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.

Shoppin'

So, I'm nearly done with my nondenominational Christmas shopping. Just have to buy a gift for one more person and I'm all finished. Hopefully tomorrow.

To get this close to being finished, I went out today. I braved The Mall parking lot (I walked through it) to get to the same stores every mall in the USA have. It was crowded in and out, very crowded.

I don't mind the crowds.

I think they're fun.

Almost everyone rushing around as if this is the most important thing they have in their lives. People trying to push through the group of three ladies barely moving, but trying to push without actually touching or just asking one to move to the side. The screaming kids with the purple faces in strollers being pushed by parents who pretend not to hear anything. The man, in his forties, who takes his place at the end of a ten person line and says, "I can't believe how crowded it is. Was it this crowded last year? I don't think it was. The crowds just get worse every year. It was never like this when I was a kid."

All this makes me laugh.

I never try to be in such a rush that I can't slow down to the speed of the three ladies in front of me. Screaming kids who look like they're heads are about to explode make me laugh. And the guy at the end of the line is wrong, it's been this bad for years.

Problems go away, they just shift to a different location for a while.

* * *

I made two mistakes today.

The first one was buying myself something that can easily be a gift from someone. I bought myself the second volume of Mickey Mouse in black and white. There was only one left in the store and I couldn't pass it up. I'm sorry if someone out there bought it for me, but I've opened mine. I couldn't help myself. I wasn't thinking.

Visiting a bookstore was my other mistake. I haven't been in a bookstore, off campus, of course, since some time in October. I have a problem: I like to buy books. After ten minutes in the store, I found myself carrying seven books and had to remind myself that I was looking for gifts for others, not myself. In the end, I found some gifts there for other people and bought myself only two. It was hard, but a decision I'll have to live with.

Tomorrow, out for the last gift and then off to work in the evening.