 it may begin to hurt shortly. Sure it's painful, but you must understand this picture, else communications cost management will remain elusive and without value. Remember, we are trapped in telephone service billing and payment before 1984, which means one bill for each telephone line, one payment for each bill. Not bad for residential and small business, school, church, library, or other organizational entity to deal with. Telephone service for the masses. What about the larger organization with a corporate headquarters and tens, hun- dreds, or maybe thousands of field offices? Or a state, county, or large city government with hundreds or thousands of employees in many locations, each with at least one telephone line. You guessed it; phone bills in boxes, not envelopes, measured in pounds, not pages. The telephone company rose to the challenge, installing service, which works well, and delivering a bill for which payment is expected in due course. Now it's someone's job to validate the bill and pay. And with that, we have arrived at the point where it starts to make sense to consider communications cost management process and practice in large and mid-size organizations-business, non-profit, government secular, or whatever-the consideration is how many telephone lines are required and being paid for. And remember, this is before 1984, and only applies to telephone service, single line access to shared switching facility based services called plain old telephone service (POTS). What's happened since 1984, you might ask. The simple answer is that begin- ning with the divestiture of AT&T and deregulation of the long distance communications industry, businesses and residential subscribers had to replace single line, single-service billing with triple billing and in many cases initially with triple payment, one for equipment, one for local service, and a third for long distance service. (For more detail on why, how, and exactly when this happened, see Chapter 2.) Stop and think about it-the number of billable items 