Silly, Paranoid Theory of the Day
I’ll bet that Verizon management decided that too many people were pronouncing their new name “Very Zohn” instead of “Vuh Rise ON”, so they staged a “strike” just to get in the news a lot so that people would learn the new name!
Speaking of Verizon (formed by the merger of BellAtlantic and GTE): whenever a company changes its name, the only thing that it logically means is that they concluded that their old brand name was a liability, not an asset. BellAtlantic and GTE have spent so long pissing off so many people with such bad customer service that their names had negative brand equity.
Which reminds me. On a completely unrelated subject, my company PaxDigita is now known as Fog Creek Software.