dodged a charging bull

as you may have guessed, i'm a pretty chatty girl.

one of the things about working this dungeon shift is that i start at 6 pm. and that pretty much locks me out of the free night minutes i get on my cell phone plan, because for its duration, i am a) working b) sleeping c) sad that my friends with 9-5s are all sleeping. so i end up using a good chunk of daytime minutes (though many are saved because a certain springtime diva converted us all to tmobile and we have tmobile-to-tmobile for free). however i check in with some nearly every day, like my roommates -- with whom communication otherwise is limited to post-it notes and halfasleep goodbyes -- and my brother, who broke his tmobile phone. so the minutes can add up.

normally this isn't too much of a problem, but i seem to be almost rid of the antisocial hermit virus i contracted last year around this time, so i'm near fullstrength talk mode. on monday i checked my minute usage and remarked to myself: 'self, what are the odds that you'd check at exactly 600 minutes! good thing you still have 400 daytime minutes left, because you still have a solid four days left in this month's billing cycle.'

yeah, except i didn't. i happen to only have a 600-minute plan.

so today when i checked my minutes, it said 802 daytime minutes used. and in a moment of clarity and panic i said to myself: 'dammit self, something just reminded me that you switched your plan from 1,000 daytime minutes to 600 daytime minutes when you got free tmob-to-tmob... which would mean you're about 200 minutes over... which would mean you're going to have to pay about $80-some bucks in charges... which probably doesn't include this last conversation you had with your mother that lasted about 30 minutes -- 18 of which you spent on hold, listening to some scraggly-voiced guy talk about adding more fruits like pluots to your diet to be healthier, like 20 times... oh shit, self, i think you're screwed.'

i looked through my old bills and found out that, indeed, last year i had downgraded to only 600 minutes a month. shit shit shit.

usually i'd have kicked myself, paid the fee and just watched my minutes next month, but something told me to call up Tmobile. (and i'm pretty sure it wasn't self.)

i talked to a real schmoozer named jamie, who hooked me up with a retroactive planchange to 1,000 minutes and i upped my free text messages (i sent about 800 of those last month, too -- it's my No. 1 form of communication to the outside world, you know) and only extended my contract for a year (which i was going to do anyway next month when it was up.) jamie (who i'm sure, as you guys had commented earlier on the ticketbi*ch post, was nicer to me than a woman would have been) made it happen and was sweet (even though he called me susan) and advised me to wait till april to upgrade my phone. thanks, dawg.

so basically, i am going to be paying about $10 extra this month (before you count however much i'll be over b/c of the extra textmessages) instead of what would probably be $100 or so extra. that was a close one!