Almost two years ago we added The Girl to our cell phone plan and got her a cell phone of her own.
It was for our convenience more than anything else, really. She was involved in sports and church and other things that necessitated calls for chauffeuring service. If she went out with friends, we wanted to be able to find out what the plans were, when she was going to be home, who was going. As she got older and started driving herself it was more of a safety issue. We wanted her to be able to call for help, and we wanted to be able to reach her if she missed curfew to tell her she'd be locked out of the house until morning.
Oh, I kid.
Knowing how people of today like to text message instead of actually TALK, we also added 400 text messages per month to her part of the plan. And she watched her time and her messages faithfully and never went over on either.
And then...
Her old phone bit the dust. The hinge broke on it, and it couldn't be repaired. She was due for a new free phone upgrade, so we went ahead and got the new phone. At the same time she asked us to upgrade the texting to unlimited and she promised to pay the additional cost.
She's been faithful to pay, I'll give her that. Sometimes we have to ask more than once, but she knows she has to pay for it and she does. She certainly ought to, because she's certainly getting her money's worth out of it.
She's gone from 400 texts a month to over 4,000. Yes, I said four THOUSAND. And because she doesn't have to watch how many texts she's using, she conveniently forgot to keep an eye on how many minutes she was using.
This past month, on our 700-minutes-per-month plan, including her free minutes, nights and weekends, she racked up 965 minutes. That's NINE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE MINUTES, FOLKS. IN ADDITION TO OVER FOUR THOUSAND TEXT MESSAGES.
So this little bird has just had her wings clipped. And not just trimmed, but shorn.
T-Mobile, our service, has a new Family Allowance service. For $2 a month the person in charge of the account (me) can decide how many minutes anyone else (The Girl) on the account is allowed to use for the month. After those minutes are used up, the only people that can be called are those who are listed by the person in charge of the account (me). And in this case that will be 911, her father, or me.
Period.
Let's see how she likes THAT guacamole.
3 comments:
Sounds reasonable to me. I may well have removed said phone altogether. She is lucky she is not my daughter! My youngest son now has a pre pay sim which allows unlimited texts and calls to O2 numbers, and as my Uk family all have O2 phones, he can call us as and when he likes, but will have to watch waht he spends to others. We will see how it works!
Oh my goodness!!! I mean OH MY GOODNESS!!! I don't think I've talked that much in my entire life and I'm three times OLDER than she is!
LOL! I remember I almost keeled over the first time the statement came in after our girl got unlimited texting. Crazy! A couple months ago we opened the cell phone bill to find a $90.00 charge over what the plan was. After going over the bill we noticed a certain number kept coming up and the phone call was usually long. Turned out that she was chatting it up without a care in the world because it was her friend who had placed the call, totally not even thinking that she was using up all our minutes. LOL. I can laugh now, but then? Not so much. She did pay the bill however. :vD
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