Phone woes

For a long time now, I have been known as a ‘phone-person’. As in I spend more time on the phone in one day than most people do so over a week. It doesn’t help that my loved ones and my closest pals are geographically distant from me, and I love talking to them whenever I can.

Trouble starts when you have to pay up for all that talk time you’ve been using. Back in India, Hutch and Airtel have earned considerable revenue over my extravagant telephone conversations. In fact, I think one of the reasons that Hutch ran into financial trouble was because they had this “family and friends” offer, which offered unlimited calling to five people. Need they say more? For almost two years, my mobile was virtually stuck to my ear. Later, I guess they realized the mistake they’d been making and cancelled the offer. Last time I heard, the company’s doing pretty well :).

I imagined that life in the US would be far easier and got myself an AT&T mobile (ATT-ATT Unlimited calls free, you see). I sensed that this would go the Hutch way. Unfortunately, there were far too many people in India I needed to stay in touch with and the paltry number of minutes ran out in under a week. It never occurred to me that unlike in India incoming also counts towards your minutes. Conclusion: A record breaking first bill. The amount is too embarrassing for me to mention here.

This was almost a year back and my memory tends to relegate such things to the background. But the AT&T monster has resurfaced. This month has been big again. A rough calculation tells me that I have bettered my own record. I am paranoid about seeing how much I owe AT&T this time around.

Calling for volunteers to bail me out. Please reach me at 312-2417 (9pm-7am only, please)


EDIT: This post sure has helped me. Many ideas poured forth and with the help of K (and C), my bank account has been rescued from a near wipeout. Thank you :)