A Cautionary Tale of Cell Phones and Suckers
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, I JOINED AN ESTIMATED 6 MILLION OTHER sheep in Southern California and acquired a mobile phone. Although proud to have held out as long as I did, I felt like a traitor to the flickering cause of appropriate social behavior when I entered the cell phone store.
Fellow woolly ruminants, you can guess what happened next.
Shame quickly gave way to giddy excitement. I signed up for a service plan that gave me an absurd 350 minutes of phone time a month for only 35 bucks. The plan included free long distance service and free use after 9 p.m. and on weekends. Free. Free.
I acquired a nifty Nokia 3390 that I could just about conceal in my hand. I could program it to dial countless telephone numbers. I could even speak a person’s name into it, and the obedient little thing would ring that person up. Wowee!
Soon I was calling friends on the other end of the continent to chat at length about nothing, and pestering my grown daughters in San Francisco and New York City with a new level of fatherly attention. Once or twice I even used my phone for business.
Then (and, fellow ovines, you saw this coming, too) I received my first monthly bill. It was for $143.
This, I learned in a call to the 800 number on my statement, was due to the fact my service began during the final week of a month. Thus I was entitled not to 350 minutes that month, but only 82 (at a prorated fee of $8). And in that one week I’d used 227, an overage of 145 minutes, billed at 45 cents per. Add to that an activation fee and $35 for the next month’s service, and, well, there you had it.
Either this wasn’t explained to me at the cell phone store, or, dazzled by visions of voice-activated dialing, I’d failed to grasp it.
Delight turned to dismay. I hadn’t purchased a clever bit of hardware. I’d bought into a system as complicated and perilous as international hedge funds. To keep from getting my pocket picked, I was going to have to pay a lot of attention to the arcane rules of my cellular phone company’s game.
Mobile phone companies can devise any booby-trapped service plans they like. Congress exempted them from the kind of consumer protections that govern other businesses, entrusting “regulation” to the free market. Walk into a cell phone store, and you are on the high seas, where pirates abound.
Last year, the California Public Utilities Commission received 4,709 consumer complaints about mobile phone service (up from 3,356 the year before) and 3,682 in the first half of this year. The complaints have prompted the CPUC to search for a better hammer to hold over the content of cellular phone service contracts. “We have been looking at just about everything to see if there’s more we can do,” says CPUC spokeswoman Kyle Devine. Proposed new rules may come this fall.
Other concerns also have elbowed their way to my mind’s forefront. The industry’s confident assertion that there is no connection between cell phone use and head cancers, for example, appears not to be the final word. Last year, an industry-funded scientific survey of the studies that raised the possibility found them “not conclusive,” but also called for more research and left open the possibility of “a serious public health problem.”
The survey report stated, for example, that keeping a cell phone’s antenna two to three inches away from the body “is the only science-based recommendation that can be supported by existing data.” The nonprofit Wireless Consumers Alliance suggests that cell phone owners employ earphone-microphone cords and keep their phones “as far away from your person as possible during use.”
A new New York state law, certain to be duplicated in California, requires drivers to use such “hands-free” devices for traffic safety reasons. But such implements may not be the ready solution we think they are. Tests performed at the University of Utah indicate that even with both hands on the wheel, drivers having cell phone conversations are less able to detect and react to unexpected occurrences.
For all these reasons, mobile phone use has already become for me just another potentially unwise appetite to keep reined in.
What galls me most is the indecorous culture that’s grown up around the phones: People in public places sticking private conversations in your face as though you don’t exist. Music concerts and momentous personal discussions interrupted by insistent electronic warblings from pockets and purses. People carrying around their little familiar worlds wherever they go, lest they experience the terror of being alone among strangers or, heaven forbid, with themselves.
I know I really should just stop my service, eat the fat cancellation fee, put my phone in a drawer and return to virtue. Modern technology, however, doesn’t readily admit of that. Once you’ve partaken, you need 10 times more will to renounce it than you did to abstain in the first place. In other words, all I can say in self-justification is, “Baaa-a-a-a . . .”
