Verizon said a quiet "Oops" last week, sending out the "Roanoke Supplementary Directory" to almost 200,000 households in the Roanoke area.

Quiet, because no one likes to admit a mistake ... especially when you can put some of the blame on someone else.

"Oops" because the supplement not only fixes errors in the government listings (the "Blue Pages") of the March phone book, but also adds the numbers of more than 2,500 Cox Communications customers who were left out.

(By law, Verizon is required to print listings from the other companies that offer phone services in the area.)

The Blue Page listings were Verizon's fault, it admits. "These are the types of things that happen in a production cycle," explained company spokesman Harry Mitchell.

Although the company wouldn't specify - or admit - what those mistakes were, there were enough that it decided to send out a supplement.

The company also notified the State Corporation Commission, which regulates telecommunications companies and other utilities, about the reprint. Verizon may have the SCC on Speed Dial; the company is already under investigation for a different set of phone-book errors - ones from the 2004 directories covering Hampton Roads, Richmond, Roanoke, and Northern Virginia.

While the SCC was contemplating Verizon's latest phone-book gaffe, Cox Communications added some fuel to the fire by notifying the SCC that between 2,500 and 2,800 of its listings were not in the Verizon directory, according to SCC spokesman Ken Schrad.

Not surprisingly, the two companies' stories differ as to who was to blame.

According to Mitchell, Verizon never received the Cox data. "We found that Cox had omitted some of their listings from the directory," he said.

Au contraire, said Cox. According to spokesman Michael Pedelty, the problem was on Verizon's end - with the way it accepts listings from outside companies.

When Cox sent phone numbers to be included, Pedelty explained, not all were accepted. "We would just get a whole batch back from them saying 'this didn't work,'" he said.

Not our problem, said Verizon. "They had time to do it, whatever the process might be," Mitchell said. "They had a responsibility to get them in and they didn't."

Finger-pointing aside, the two companies were able to resolve the problem of the missing listings and agreed to include them in the supplement.

Cox picked up some of the cost, although neither company would disclose how much.

Next stop: damage control.

"This was our first time doing this," Pedelty said, referring to Cox's Roanoke operation. And "the number of errors was relatively small when you look at the size of the book."

Sending out 18 pages of corrections "is not something we do a lot of," Mitchell said. "Quite frankly, we haven't had the need to."

"Of course we regret the errors," Pedelty said. "We want to work with Verizon to improve the process."

Verizon is happy to oblige. "We're a company that's committed to high-quality products," Mitchell said.

And the SCC is working to make sure that's true. The supplement is "sort of a short-term solution to a couple of identified problems," according to commission spokesman Ken Schrad, "but the goal of the commission is to find a long-term solution."