Knowing that technology can sometimes make our lives easier and more rich has to be tempered with knowing that it can also lead us down bad paths, enticing us with things we really don’t need at costs we really can’t afford.
Earlier this summer I decided to go wireless: that is, to get rid of my home phone and rely completely on my cell phone and a cable modem. I was none too shy about it either–I was proud of letting go of Ma Bell’s hand after years of lining her purse with cash for a phone line I thought I no longer needed.
Smug, self-satisfied and technologically evolved, I sang the gospel of living wireless, with my little Sprint PCS phone in hand and my old cordless phone and Caller ID units stuffed in a cardboard box.
A week and a half ago, I got my first Sprint PCS bill since going wireless. My bill came out to $187.59–about six times what I used to pay Southwestern Bell for local phone service.
I blinked. Twice.
All right, well, they must not have gotten my last payment. I scanned the itemized bill and looked. Nope, there it was. They got last month’s payment.
$187.59. The amount due remained.
I went into a small panic, my little technological nirvana crumbling around me. Looking at the list of calls, I saw that right around June 15, I ran out of the 600 “free” minutes that I usually pay $47 a month to use. That’s when I began to get charged 25 cents per minute for every call.
How did I make 1,340 minutes worth of phone calls? I don’t sell Time-Life books for a living. I’m not a Psychic Friend. What was I doing on the phone all month?
I scanned the list of calls. The final insult was an $11 call I made one evening to a friend who lives four houses down the street from me. At this point, the world began to go out of focus and I had to lie down, using the eight-page bill as a thick blindfold.
After a nap and some ibuprofen, I called Sprint PCS to ask about my bill. With little more to back my case up than the plaintive whine of “this seems like an awful lot. Is this right?” I was assured that I had indeed used that many minutes and was well on my way to getting a similar bill for the following month.
The customer representative was patient and told me that she gets lots of calls from customers who go over on their minutes and get bill shock at the end of the month. “Usually, they upgrade their plan to include more minutes if they think they’re going to use that many every month,” she said.
I hung up, still holding the statement. I pondered my situation. A few hours later, I found myself driving to a convenience store to make a call from a phone booth. It was not one of my proudest moments.
The thing about new technology is that it promises so much. Your life will be easier. Making phone calls from anywhere will be effortless.
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But in this rush to give ourselves more options, it’s easy to get sucked in and to live beyond our means. I learned that I talk on the phone much more than I ever imagined and that the tradeoff to living wireless is that I can’t talk for as long as I want whenever I want, even locally.
I’m thinking about giving this whole wireless experiment a little more time. Just as we expect the gadgets and inventions we bring into our lives to adapt to our ever-changing lifestyles, we must also be adaptable, learning to adjust our habits just enough to make all the innovation worthwhile.
Just don’t get me started on my cable bill.