New Cell Phone Blues

I love my wife... a lot. She is absolutely perfect for me, and I could not imagine my life without her. What I am about to post is not really her fault, but it is an interesting story about her.

For Christmas, her parents bought her a Palm Treo. Being the cheapskate that I am, I scoffed at it because she had a phone and a PDA already and she has a reputation of not being very gentle with her cell phones. In fact, the phone she replaced was a cheapie that had replaced a fairly new and very nice Motorola RAZR which she had dropped in the toilet. Oddly enough, we still have the RAZR in our office. I assume this is because we are hoping for some sort of an immaculate restoration or something.

But I digress...

She got this new phone, and she has been very good to it. I have to admit that I am jealous because my phone was actually cheaper than her cheapie phone.

Side note: My cheapie phone was bought to replace the other cheapie phone I had left on the plane in Mexico on our honeymoon.

Anyway, she wanted the phone because there are some programs that will help her in her new profession, and this does seem to be the case.

So, let's leave that story and move over to a different one...

About that same timeframe, I started my new job with the Federal Government. As a federal employee, we get a discount on our cell phone service which I promptly applied for. However, immediately after this. our monthly bill increased by $60-$80 a month! After examination, the culprit was discovered...my wife was using the internet on her phone. We talked about it and she agreed to only use it for emergencies so I expected the bill to go back down.

When the next month rolled around, it was almost the same amount. Once again, we looked into it and it was a data fee. She suggested that it was overrun from the last month because she had definitely not been using the internet.

This month, the bill not only did not go down, it went up another $20! At this point, we realized something else was going on. My wife did a little searching and found out that one of the professional programs on her Treo automatically updated every Sunday at 1 AM. Each time it did, we were charged about $30 in data fees! Suffice it to say, this has been fixed and should make next month's bills a LOT more manageable.