I’m afraid I have to pay my bills while I write this column. I realize you deserve better, but–wait a minute, have to sign my name on this check–I have no choice; there’s no longer enough time to do both separately.
And, yes, I am also going to write about bill-paying here, since I am not good at concentrating on two things at once, unless it’s having conjugal relations while watching “NewsNight With Aaron Brown.”
Now, some of you might fear that a column about bill-paying will inevitably descend into cliche, as people have been complaining about this subject for as long as they have been carrying on about airline food or college roommates who smell.
But the truth is, bill-paying today bears almost no resemblance to bill-paying of yesterday. Think about this for a second while I affix this stamp: Twenty-five years ago, every month a person might have to pay gas, electric, telephone, credit card and alimony. That’s it. Fifteen years ago, that same person still only had to pay gas, electric, telephone, credit card, cable TV and two alimonies.
Today, though, life has become little more than a collection of monthly fees. The list is practically endless, especially if you repeat things: gas, electric, telephone (now with voice mail, call waiting and caller ID), credit card, credit card to pay off the first credit card, Internet, health club, BlackBerry, satellite TV, satellite radio, electric, Internet, gas, health club, billoreilly.com Premium Membership, cell phone, etc.
While on the subject of cell phones, why is it that wrong numbers to your cell are so unpleasant and borderline creepy? With regular phones, the wrong-number dialer is usually perfectly civilized: “Hello, is Lord Willoughby of Fairfax available?” “I think you’ve got the wrong number.” “Oh, I am terribly sorry.” “Don’t worry about it.” “Why, thank you. We should take tea together sometime.” “Sure, call me.” Click.
But when someone calls your cell phone and it’s the wrong number, inevitably that person sounds not just like he doesn’t know how to speak English, he doesn’t know how to speak at all. The conversation typically goes like this: “Hello.” “Is Uggah Dere?” “I think you’ve got the wrong number.” “Uggah?” “No, it’s the wrong number.” “No Uggah?” “No.” Click.
To think we pay $75 a month for the pleasure of having a phone number one digit away from Uggah’s.
So, who do we have to thank for our monthly fee-based lives? Cable TV clearly has to bear the lion’s share of the blame. Before cable, no one considered monthly fees for home entertainment. You paid for your TV, plugged it in, watched “Dance Fever,” and that was that.
We’re lucky, I suppose, that back in the 1980s, the makers of other electronic devices didn’t introduce fee-based services, and that we don’t now pay $50 a month to, say, use the blender or that no one has to worry about forgetting to pay their monthly pacemaker bill.
Yet, as the future brings new technologies, fee-based services will only increase. Already, it seems that just when you have a handle on all your monthly bills, a new one crops up for a service you might not have even heard of a year ago but that all of a sudden seems indispensable. Don’t be surprised if, 10 years from now, you find yourself saying, “Honey, I finally signed up for mini-belly-dancer video hologram service. Only $20 a month.”
For me, the next monthly fee on the horizon will likely be $12.95 for TiVo.
I realize I could avoid this, since TiVo also offers a one-time fee of $299 for a lifetime of service. But I don’t think I feel comfortable with that. I mean, what if I were to die unexpectedly after having TiVo for only a month? Then, not only would I be dead, but I’d have lost $286.05 on the deal.
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Well, listen, I’d love to stick around and write an excellent concluding paragraph, but I have to find a mailbox, and then, since I’m paying to get CNN, watch a little “NewsNight.”
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