Adventures in Telephony, Part One

As most of you already know, my roommate prysmicdork moved out about two weeks ago, since she's going to Scotland in the fall. This of course necessitated the transferring of utilities from her name to mine -- she had the water, power and phone, and I had the cable, which, given our joint media habits, added up to something pretty close to the sum of the water, power and phone all by itself. (The place is well insulated, so the power bill is actually quite cheap for a house this size.) We took care of the details the day before she headed back to Oregon, and I relaxed, a productive, bill-paying member of society.

Then, this evening I checked the mail and discovered a letter from the phone company, insisting on a $200 deposit before they were willing to transfer service. I checked with Alex and discovered that they had held her mother -- a perfectly creditworthy human being -- to the same extortionate standards, which I consider patently ridiculous. My phone bill is $25 a month. I have lived at this address for two years, which they asked me about when we did the transfer; they know I'm not going to make thousands of dollars worth of international phone calls or anything like that. There is no reason for me to give them eight months worth of payment up front.

This raises the question, however, of what to do about a phone. I can certainly call them and say "Right, fuck off then," but I'm not going to burn the bridge before I see what I can squeeze them for.

I see three possibilities that I can threaten them with, namely: 1) Cancel the landline and do nothing, relying on the 300 minutes of peak airtime and free nights/weekends that I get with my cellphone; 2) Cancel the landline and expand my cell plan; 3) Cancel the landline and become an early adopter -- in other words, jump ship for Voice over IP.

1) is a no-brainer, but I suspect it's the least likely to work; if I just tell them I'm cancelling, then they can write me off as a cheap motherfucker and not feel bad about it. On the other hand, if I make it clear to them that I am voting with my dollars for a competitor -- particularly a Scrappy New Technology Competitor who undercuts MacLeodUSA left and right -- I might just be able to wrangle them into rescinding that whole deposit idea. After all, having to contact everyone I know and let them know a new number will be a massive pain in the ass, and I'd rather save myself time and effort if I can social-engineer some poor underpaid customer service rep's manager into doing that for me.

Will it work? I guess we'll find out tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for Adventures in Telephony, Part Two.

(Note to self: cancel the digital cable, dumbass, you don't watch TV.)

New address and phone number

Thanks to elwe's generosity, I can now be reached at clonearmy@gmail.com. (I was also considering "evilclonearmy", but "clonearmy" is shorter.)

Before long I will also have a new phone number -- yes, there will be Parts Two and Three of Adventures in Telephony at some point -- but I'll hold off on distributing that until the VoIP adapter arrives. Vonage doesn't have any numbers in the 319 area code, but I was able to pick from just about any other area code in the country, so I went with Houston. (Iowans, I guess you get to call my cellphone.)

More news as it happens.