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Not- So-Free Minutes Dear AT&T Wireless Customer Service Representative: Receiving my September AT&T Wireless bill was a lot like receiving a bill after a visit to an eye, ear, nose, and throat hospital. Except this one wasn’t covered by insurance. I had argued with my wife for months to stick with our old VoiceStream cell phone plan because it was terrible and was up front about being terrible. I knew it was ten dollars a minute to call home from my car, so I kept the thing in a strongbox under the seat and used it only when trapped behind the wheel when the car was aflame after rolling down an embankment. I told her to call me only when she was sure an intruder was going through the antique secretary in the dining room, and then only if she had already tried 911, and then only if she was sure I was not in the extended area. Once I explained to her about the charges for incoming calls, she took it well. “But,” she argued each night before bed, while I placed the strongbox with the cell phone in the crawl space in the back of the attic where our kids are sure there’s a dead body, “AT&T is offering a flat rate of 39.99 a month with 1,000 free minutes a month, plus free calls after 9 PM. No, I said. Whatever they want you to believe the deal is, and whatever you believe the deal is, the real deal is the cell phone comes out of the strongbox under the seat and gets put in the change holder. The real deal is I begin talking to my clients in complete English sentences instead of an improvised hybrid of Morse code and broken Esperanto. The real deal is I start calling home in spare moments to say silly things like “I love you” and “The PSA test came back positive.” The real deal is I get so comfortable driving and yaking, I hook up the earpiece that comes with the phone to avoid ending up looking like Stephen Hawking. The real deal is, once the cell phone has been adopted into our family like Elsa in the movie Born Free, we get socked with the kind of bill that makes Homo sapiens extinct. Alas, the September bill for $469.42 hasn’t yet made me extinct. All it’s really done is piss me off and prompt me to make enough free post-9 PM calls to make up for the September, October, and November bills combined--not just my own, but also those belonging to a traveling fertilizer salesman covering the PA/NJ/NY region who takes college football action on the side and whom I’ve never even had the pleasure of meeting. “Hey, Vito,” I say to myself at 3:23 AM as I comb through my little black book for the phone number of that bartender out in LA I met two years ago who said if he ever comes east he might want to catch a Yankee game, “this one’s for you!” So the catch here was 1,000 free minutes a month . . . but only the first month. Thereafter, it’s 350 free minutes and 40 cents and up for all minutes above and beyond. That would have been nice to know in the 29th minute of a conversation I had with my cousin midday on August 17th about whether reincarnation was possible. Right about now, I’m wondering if I’ll come back as a sucker too. Hats off to your Wharton-trained consultants, who figured you’d make more than enough money duping new customers in the first 90 days of service to compensate for the people who spend 38 percent of their natural lives reading fine print, the people who simply don’t pay their bills, and the people working swing shift at Dunkin’ Donuts. As for me, I was raised by proud yet savvy first and second generation Americans who grudgingly live up to even their most muddled, misleading agreements while methodically plotting how to get back into the black. So then, please accept this payment of $250 toward the September bill. I’ll worry about the gas and electric bills some other month. It’s after 9, and I’ve still got 347 people from my graduating class who haven’t been warned about this scam and other ones like it. Might be nice to reminisce for a few hours too. And when that’s done, I can start on my junior high. Matter of fact, the fine print says we’ve still got 20 months left in our 24-month contract, so I should be able to work my way down through Montessori School and back up again. If by chance you want to cancel our contract, call me on my regular phone. The cell phone will either be in use or in a strongbox under the seat. Yours truly, Rich Herschlag. Click here to rant back. |