Just a little bit of advice for you all today. If your cell phone ever says “ROAM” on it, and you have Cingular as your provider, like I do, read that as “SCAM”. Given the per-minute charges, it looks like dealing with a roaming cell phone requires six hops over a network of civilian and leased military satellites. I paid both long distance and roaming charges, which I expected, but the roaming was ten times the cost of the long distance. Boom! That’s one thousand percent higher, if you prefer to look at it that way. That’s saying something, given the fact that the actual cost of the telephony is probably less than the long distance charge.

I’m sure it was all in the contract somewhere. There’s no law that protects you from buying something that costs far more than it should. Problem is that I roam infrequently enough that I’m not familiar with this particular price trap.

Imagine this: you walk into a fast food joint and order a cheeseburger, fries, and a drink, and then, on a whim, order an ice cream cone, something you haven’t done in years. The cashier rings it up without blinking, waits till you gobble it down, then announces, “That will be $65.12, sir.” After you finish reacting to the number you look up at the menu and see that sure enough, the cone was $59.99, for some unfathomable reason. Yep, you should have looked first, but you weren’t expecting the menu to be sporting prices so incommensurate as to be punitive.

There’s no way for me to say to Cingular, “Here, have your telephony back.” I already consumed it. So it’s an expensive lesson for me, a $225 lesson. That’s quite a lesson. For that sort of tuition I expect tutoring, a personalized leather-bound workbook, and a certificate suitable for framing. Instead I’m getting a crappy bulk-printed bill and a pile of regret to enjoy at my convenience. You, however, dear reader, are receiving this same education for the mere cost of the time it takes you to read this far. Make the most of it.