A Power of Money

So, I pretended I wanted to buy one and went through the phone thing I wrote about this morning to see what the plans were.

Yeah.

Okay, the cheapest one, the one with the least minutes and not unlimited minutes on weekends, was $39.99 a month, pretty comparable to just about everything out there. Then, to get the deal on the phone, you have to get the phone internet connection thing.

Yeah.

The cheapest one of those is $30 per month and limits what you can do for free on the 'net. The more expensive one is twice as much and lets you do wireless stuff through a Bluetooth. I don't understand why that should cost more if you can already access the intersblag. Is it that much faster? It had better be like 8 times faster.

Whatever.

And the at least $70 a month is all wrapped up into a nice-for-them 2-year contract.

Yeah.

I don't think that, even with the great deal on a cool phone, I'm going to be ordering one of these.

The thing is that I'd like a mobile phone. I could get rid of my land line and hold on to one phone number for a long, long time, even if I move to another city.

The problem is that I don't use the phone that much. I only pick it up like once, maybe twice, a week. The rest of the time the machine picks up and whoever called hangs up.

Right now, I pay about $17.50 each month for that honor. I'm sure as hell not going to spend four times as much to not use a phone more than a couple of times each week.

"Ah, but what about those prepaid phones?" some savvy reader may ask.

To which I'd reply, "The ones I've looked at aren't quite right either."

See, it looks like there are two deals:
1) You get a phone and then buy the prepaid time on a card. After a given amount of time, the money you put up expires.
--OR--
2) You get a prepaid contract that you re-up every six months or a year, when ever it expires and the money you didn't spend moves over to the next contract period, but if you decide to go to another company, or in some cases a new phone, you lose all the money you've spent.

Neither one seems like a good plan for a guy like me.
1) I don't want to lose money by not using the time I've already bought because I'm not "popular" or I prefer being face to face or write an e-mail.
--OR--
2) There goes any thought to having flexibility on a prepaid plan.

And here I am, mobile phoneless and quite likely to remain this way, even if I do move.