No, I didn't know.

 When we relocated to Beaumont there was no opportunity to retain our land-line telephone number of thirty plus years.  We surveyed three communication companies in an effort to keep that number.   Currently we’re reorganizing our telephone service and I got the idea to explore resurrecting that decades old set of digits.  Since we had contracted with AT&T for those thirty years I began my inquiries anew with their customer  service folks.  After my few responses to the AI system gate-keeper I was awarded a conversation with a man whose home is somewhere in Sri Lanka.  He declined to tell me the name of his home city, but he was, nevertheless, cordial.  Once provided with my inactive AT&T account number and the telephone number I was seeking to activate, the customer representative told me conclusively that no person in the AT&T organization has the power to cause our number to ever become available for use.  That ten digit number has simply ceased to exist.  To my offer to pay whatever the cost might be in order to make the number available once again, that man said “you know, it cannot be done, you know.  You know we cannot do it, you know.  You know I have been doing this for four years, you know.  It cannot be done.  You know.”