In case you hadn't already come to this conclusion yourself: Bills suck!
This is the one part about being a grown-up that they don't make a Fisher Price toy to replicate. They make toy cell phones and small plastic kitchens. You can create an entire grocery store and fill it with inedible food so children can take turns buying and charging each other for sustenance. There are even small motorized vehicles made for people who are too young to know how to spell their last name. (But don't get me started on those. The boyfriend likes to laugh at my rage during those segments on "America's Funniest Home Videos.")
But there are no toy creditors. You can't buy a set to play "corporation."
The hydro bill came in the mail. And I'm not upset because it's so astronomical, because it isn't. I'm upset because our experiment to cut down on our hydro use seems to have failed. After far too many years of having my computer on 24/7, I've finally taken to shutting it down at night. We also turn off both of the power bars in the office every evening, not turning them back on until we return home from work the following evening. I thought for sure that this would make a difference. But somehow we ended up using a tiny bit more hydro. I'm blaming it on Christmas lights and the fact that it's dark a lot this time of year, and I don't like to sit in a dark, or even dim, room. Maybe we'll see better results come spring.
The other bill that pissed us off today was from everyone's favourite evil telecommunications company - Bell. There was a mysterious new $8 charge on our bill for bandwidth usage, or something like that. The boyfriend called to find out what that is, and it's all about the amount of things we download or upload from our computers. (Maybe you already knew this, but we did not.) We only get a certain amount of stuff before they start charging. And apparently Facebook requires a lot of bandwidth, from looking at people's photos and videos, and uploading your own. I also love to watch movie trailers online, which apparently uses bandwidth.
Once you know what it is, it totally makes sense. But the boyfriend fought the charge on the grounds that we were not informed that we had to pay for such a thing. And the Bell guy happily removed it, which is good on one hand, but on the other hand it's like they're admitting that we caught them trying to be totally sneaky and underhanded. And then they used the opportunity to try to sell us more bandwidth per month. They're such crooks.
Can I just go back to playing house rather than keeping one?
Today was going to be a "Spend Nothing Monday," but then I remembered that we had to grocery shop. Oops.
Total debt: $10,500 plus a bit more
Spent today: $36.86
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Because of today's Bell comments, I decided to look up my myBell.ca account to ensure that my bandwidth usage was still set to 60GB per month - only to find that they had capped it at 2GB and were also charging me that nasty $7.50/GB additional fee (which I was aware of because we've exceeded our limit before when we were on the lite plan). I phoned and apparently the myBell.ca isn't synched up properly with my actual account because I'm on an old contract regime. Anyway, if you want more bandwidth, I suggest haggling with Bell. The worst that can happen is that you stay on the contract you have. The best is you save money. We kept getting dinged with the over-use fee and were being charged about $47/mo for using only 4GB/mo. I haggled and now we are locked in at $34/mo with 60GB available to us each month and a faster speed. It pays to negotiate! And yes, I agree the extra fees suck! ;-)
Care :-)
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