Yeah utterly pointless, yet still amusing to me.
I have a cell phone plan that is Precambrian, back when I used to work for the a phone company, that is grandfathered in as uncancellable. 450 phone minutes a month, and unlimited data, and it shows on their systems as “unknown plan”:“unknown data plan”
I don’t like talking to people so 450 minutes a month is way above my normal usage.
Well this month things have been going on and I have been using my phone a lot. And I just got an email :eek: I only have 20 minutes left on my plan before I am out of them by months end at 7/7, and I only have my rollover minutes* to rely on, and don’t I want to pay for more minutes and change to a different plan?
- The fine prints lets me know I only have 18,645 rollover minutes left or 300 hours doing the math.
But think of the danger! What if you got involved in a really important phone conversation and stayed on your phone continuously! Why you’d run out of minutes as soon as … July 10 …
Okay, maybe this isn’t a crisis.
We had an 850 min/mo family plan up until last month when we changed both of our phones to pay-as-you-go. If it was a suuuuuuuper busy month, we *might *have used 100 minutes, and that included my husband giving it out as his work number, so he got lots of work-related calls. We lost hundreds of rollover minutes every month.
So now, instead of paying about $100/mo plus 20¢ per text, we pay $100 per year per phone, and that is whittled down by 10¢ per minute for calls and 20¢ per text. For two retirees, it’s a perfect plan, and no contract. Neither of us wants or needs a smart phone - my phone cost all of $20.
Now that I think of it, we’ve come a long way from our first mobile phone that came in a little suitcase…
Yeah, we have two smartphones that use maybe 30 minutes a month between them (with most voice time being cell-to-cell anyway) and maybe 2-300k in data, and sometimes as many as 10 texts. So nice to have unlimited voice and text and the mimimum 1GB data plan…
(Both get used heavily as tablets… on wifi.)
I’d really like a reasonable data-only plan where minutes and texts are 25-30 cents or so. It would be a hundred bucks a month cheaper. But such plans have disappeared from all major carriers. (And Big V, with its super-simplified unlimited voice/text plans, is the only functional option here anyway.)