Life goes on

So this is a bitter sweet kind of tale.

The good thing is that my cell phone is a company phone. I never see a bill, it just works. It’s a very nice thing. But, and this is where I start to sound lame, it’s an old phone. It is smaller than a brick and doesn’t need a hand crank to get it going – so the phone is not all that bad.

Spending a few minutes on the website looking to personalize the ring tone today it became very apparent that any tune, no matter how great a song it may be on CD, sounded awful on my phone. It would be painfully lame to hear most of these bits and beeps repeat themselves as I ignore one of you calling me.

Up until a few days ago I had the exact same phone for three years. It played “If I Only Had a Brain” from the Wizard of Oz. But when that phone became funky, I asked for a new one. Which was no problem for IT, they had a whole box of unused phones that were the exact same make and model from three years ago (lay offs.) We just had to switch the SIM card.

I found out another important tid-bit on the website while I looked for new ring a ding-dings. My total charge for the month of December, a busy month for calls, was $1.81. My total number of minutes for the plan is 350,000. Everything else, like text, peek and non-peek are all unlimited.

It is at this point when I remember a conversation with Tracey, our purchasing person who had a bit of a crush on me before the company was bought, when she explained the phone plan to me. She had switched nearly everyone in the company to this one plan. It had this huge number of pooled minutes, so if one person spent a little more time on the phone it would balance out with someone who talked less. Of all the phones she had bought and put on this plan, I know of only two other people who are still on this plan with me. Everyone else has moved on to thin mints or crack-berries.

So I hold the power in my hand of never going over minutes, unlimited text messages, and unlimited peek minutes with out ever seeing the bill. Wow, the glory of it all. But the ring tones suck. I ended up putting on the Beatles Ob La Di, Ob La Da.

Life goes on.