Say It Ain't So!

Holy Smokes! I logged on to the SprintPCS web page and viewed my bill for next month...almost $250! Say it ain't so! When I click on "view my invoice", what comes up is my last two payments and the amount I owe for this month (that I just paid this week). I am REALLY hoping that $250 is some total of a bill I paid last month that maybe arrived a day or two late combined with the payment I already paid this month. Guess we'll wait and see.

So here's what happened. I was on the Fair and Flexible Plan...and very happy with it by the way. We got 700 anytime minutes, free 7pm nights and weekends, free PCS to PCS calling and just $5 for every 100 minutes we went over all on a shared plan. I wish bills were more like the Energizer Bunny...I wish they'd keep "going and going" instead of "coming and coming". But since the bills kept coming, and since new doctors keep sending us their bills, I decided we needed to cut the budget in several areas. I cut our cell phone plan back (a LOT) and cut off all the extra services on our home phone. Made a few other cuts here and there, and for a week or two, it seemed like it helped. Now, Sprint did tell me NOT to go over my minutes on my smaller plan. Whereas I paid $5 for every 100 minutes I was over on the Fair and Flexible Plan, I would not pay 41 cents each MINUTE I went over on this new plan. Well, by the time I checked our minutes for the first time, we were hemoraging bad...WAY over our minutes. And then it took another week for Brooke to figure out that every time she checked her voice mail from her cell phone (because we quit taking calls), it was costing us 41 cents a minute!

I have had a love/hate relationship with SprintPCS. I think it all depends who I get on the phone. Sometimes I get somebody who is very helpful and sometimes I get somebody who wants to make me think there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ON EARTH they can do to help me. When I tried to find a smaller (i.e. "cheaper") plan, the person I talked to was not very helpful. When I realized how far we had gone over our minutes (in our defense, we get a LOT of work-related calls on our phones) and called to go back to my Fair and Flexible Plan, I got a helpful person who gave me 60 minutes instant credit on my current bill. Granted, I'm still going to have to take out a personal loan to pay SprintPCS this next month (not literally), I still thought the gesture was nice. They gave me the credit before I switched back to my bigger (i.e. "more expensive") plan.

So, I'm not yet sure what is the lesson to be learned here. I guess, "Don't ever get a cell phone, because once you have one, you never realize how much you use it"? The part that is frustrating is the fact that I was trying to save money and cut back on the budget, but in reality, I threw the budget out of whack for a couple months to come now! But we'll make it...and boy oh boy...we ought to be on Sprint's "A" list this month.

-Rob