Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Sayonara, long distance

I'm on the phone now with James at AT&T. We've considered eliminating our land line completely, but the new father part of me says we'd only need 911 one time to justify keeping it. And all our friends have the number. So instead, I'm cutting back what I can.

First, I'm having him drop our long-distance service, since a look at our last bill shows 4 long-distance calls made last month, a total of about 20 minutes, which cost us about $14. Obviously, that's not worth it when we have cell phones which work just as well. Now James is telling me that there's a one-time $9 fee to get rid of them. In an actual free market, you don't pay service providers for the honor of NOT using their service, but we live in a corporatarchy. And they wonder why people are ditching their land lines?

I'm also getting rid of the Non-Published Service, which is costing us $5.50 a month. Having an unpublished number is nice, since it keeps annoying spam calls to a minimum. But is it really worth $66 a year? I guess we'll find out.

If I start getting a bunch of telemarketing calls, I can always just get rid of the phone line altogether. If I can afford the fee for that, that is.

3 comments:

Bud said...

Holy Cow! It's been 1 1/2 hours since you posted this. I Googled corporatarchy to see if there was any such-a-thing as that there. Not only has the term been used before, but Arboretum was the 4th listed source of the term.

Alice said...

If AT&T becomes the major provider I'll cancel all my phone communicators and and anyone I want to correspond with will have to put up with letters or personal visits. I will not knowingly do business with AT&T. They lie,mislead and generally disrespect their customers.

Alice said...

In place of the non-published number you can list your number on the national do not call list and you won't be getting spam calls. It's worked for me.