Hi, everyone. Basically I’m bored at work, which happens pretty often. I figure if I can do a lot of mouse-clicking and typing, like I am right now, then it appears as though I’m busy. Hence the new membership in the message board community.
But it seems as though people have to make some sort of comment or complaint here. OK, well, I was looking at my latest phone bill last night. Have you ever actually looked at all the stuff you get charged for? I think about half the charges were for actual service and a few long-distance calls. The rest of the bill was comprised of random unnamed taxes and directory assistance, which I had thought was free (when did it stop being free?). So that’s my complaint. They’ve stuck all kinds of random stuff into a phone bill because nobody really spends more than ten seconds looking at their phone bill.
What’s up with that?
Anyway, nice to meet everyone.
Tom
My land-line phone bill looks like a Steven Wright one-liner compared to my cell bill, which is delivered every month in gold-inlaid, leather-bound volumes by Loomis truck. It’s not that my bills are that astronomical, it’s just that they apparently hope to distract you from the seven or eight lines of useful information present (in which they lay out the two items you know you’re paying for plus the six items you can’t identify but apparently have to pay for anyway) with a hurricane of itemized, to-the-second, page-turning billing wherein much is written but nothing is really said. Much like campaign speeches.
Anyway, passable first attempt at MPSIMSing from you. Vaguely Seinfeldian. But nice to meet you. The animal handler will be round shortly to [del]drag[/del] introduce you to the [del]animals[/del] members here.
Welcome to our little community…Kythereia will be here soon…put on this helmet and wait…
Oddly enough, this is very similar to how I got started lurking here. I didn’t want to get to many web page hits so I started looking for something on the internet where it would take a long time to read one page. I figured that nice long message threads would keep me occupied without to many clicks. Of course I am clicking like mad randomly on the page so that I sound busy.
Also, I have not looked at my phone statement in months or years so I have nothing to say about that.
Welcome to the Board. The Phone Bills are the only Bills I do not handle. My wife works for AT&T so these are hers. They frighten me. They frighten me a lot and I negotiate with the Cable company. So it takes a lot to frighten me. 
Enjoy your stay,
Jim
I hate deciphering phone bills. My cell phone bill doesn’t actually have a due date on it… it just has a number, and the date the bill was issued, and the time frame things are itemised for. I assume the due date is a month after that time frame ends, so I try and pay it then, but it would be nice if it actually said so, like all my other bills do!
I spend a lot of time here, but not at work. I don’t have a dedicated computer, so I can’t really just keep something open and go back to it around the work I have to do. I used to, at my old job. I also kept a Notepad file with an ebook from Project Gutenberg… I figured even if I did get caught, of all the things I could be doing, brushing up on literature wasn’t really a huge offence (I read Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-glass, Macbeth and The Three Musketeers at work!)
Elected officials will hide taxes in a lot of your utility bills, because they know that most people don’t look at them very closely. It’s a way of paying for things without upsetting too many people – until you, now. About directory assistance, that hasn’t been free for several years, I think. There are ad-based ones, though, like 1800free411, that are free if you don’t mind giving up 15 seconds – which most people, I think, don’t mind.
Here’s to hoping your bosses don’t look over your shoulder and see you reading these words, now, before they bark “Get back to work!” at you.