stevenpiziks | Phone and Numbers

Sasha's phone is at least three years old--ancient! I checked with the phone company, and he's definitely due for an upgrade. Sasha had never heard of this. "Upgrade? What is upgrade?"

"It means you can get a new phone for cheap or for free if I'm willing to sign a two-year contract with phone company."

"New phone? I want a new phone!"

We scrolled through the ones on the phone company's web site, and he really liked the back-flip android phone. It was priced at one cent with the upgrade.

I looked up AT&T store locations and called. The first place had none in stock but would have it on Friday. The second place had them, so off we went. It took considerable time to find them because the address didn't appear in the proper place on my iPhone's map. (Ironic that the phone company's own store was listed in the wrong place on the product it sells.) But at last we arrived.

The phone Sasha wanted was listed at the store as $50. I blinked. "The web site lists a different price," I said.

The sales clerk looked up my account and discovered this was true. He said he suspected that price was for a new line or new account.

"The web site lists it as a penny," I said, "under =this= line."

The clerk checked with the manager. I, meanwhile, told Sasha that if it was $50, we'd go home and order it and he could wait a few days for it to arrive. He didn't like this idea, but such is life.

A few minutes later, the clerk came back and said that the $50 price was correct and the one cent price was indeed for a new line. "But," he added quickly, "she got it changed, so we can give you the web site's price."

Well, good. Because then we started, as I expected, the additions. The case--and Sasha needed one--was $30. (And those cases can't cost more than $5 to make, ship, and stock.) And did we want a car charger for $30 more? "If you buy it with the case, we take off ten bucks, so you save $10," the clerk said.

Nope. The phone has a USB port, and the car has a USB plug. It'll charge the phone--we checked--so I don't need to pay $20 to save $10.

And then there was the data plan. Sasha's old phone didn't have Internet or texting, but he wanted both on this one. Meanwhile, I checked my iPhone data usage. See, iPhone started with a $30 a month charge for all the Internet you can eat. Then they found out this takes up too much bandwidth, so they changed it to $15 for 200 MB a month or $25 for 2 gigs a month. My highest usage was 180 MB, and that was because Sasha watched lots of videos on my phone, which he won't do now.

In addition, one of the phones on our family plan has texting for $5 a month and 250 messages. Sasha wanted texting, but I had no idea if he needed an all-you-can-eat plan or not. However, a family texting cost $30 per month.

I was already paying $60 per month for data plans and minimal texting. If I cancled the low texting plan, downgraded my data plan, put Sasha on 2 gig Internet, and added infinite texting for all phones on the account, I'd pay $65 per month. Okay, then.

The clerk handled the switch, popped the chip from Sasha's old phone into his new one, and set up Sasha's phone.

He's been glued to it ever since he got home. I've already gotten more texts from him today than I've gotten over the life of my phone!