So I finally caved and got a cell phone a while ago. I used it for the roadtrip here (Santa Barbara). I switched number in the middle of the month (9/16). Now, as I understood it, the billing cycle started towards the end of the month, so the first month, I'd get a buttload of minutes (300) free to use for only half a month, and since I switched numbers halfway and got a compeltely new account, that it would happen a second time. At least I remember asking the sales rep and she said "oh yeah, you should have all your minutes for the remaining time this month." What she DIDN'T say was that "all your minutes" = all your pro-rated minutes. In other words, I thought I had 300 minutes when I had 150. So I've been using the cell and keeping it under 300 minutes for the half months. Great until I finally could access my account and saw that that's not what AT&T thinks. Of course, I was stupid to assume that they would give me extra minutes (I asked, mind you, but stupid to not make sure and believe). So now they are raping me up number 2 because I'm so many minutes overboard or whatnot. I had to talk to a rep for 1 hour (almost) before he finally agreed to compromise. He didn't give me my money back (damn you ATT damn you!) but he did agree to count the 9/18 - 10/17 period as a billing cycle (sort of) and refund me $60 extra on top of adjusting for too few minutes (for some reason, ATT gave me 100 fewer minutes under my new SB account...dumbasses) This way, my bill up to now is about $70 instead of $150 (!!!). Oy. That's still a mighty expensive lesson for me to learn to never trust phone companies. I'm a dumbass as well.

Moral of the story: check your phone bill online often and don't ever feel bad keeping the customer care people on the line. Though I had to give props to the rep with me today. If I were on the other side, I might have just been inclined to give up after 20 minutes of talking to the dumbass who's now writing this blog.