… I got a cell phone.

I do, however, refuse to become one of THOSE people. You know the ones. The ones who don’t seem capable of removing the damn things from their ears. The ones who, in the middle of a conversation with you, will pull it out, and flip it open and walk away from you while talking into the phone (EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE VOICEMAIL AND KNOW THE CALL ISN’T IMPORTANT!) Or, (you see them a lot at university) those people who sit in class fiddling with the damn things for an hour on end. No, I don’t intend to be one of those people.

The phone, for me, is serving a very limited purpose. Our family (formerly) had one cell phone. We did, however, have two cars. This created a problem when paranoia about dying on a regular trip required a cell phone be carried along any time a car left Stratford. For example, when I would go up to Erin’s house; I’d have to wait for my Dad to arrive home so that I could bring the cell phone with me (the beautiful part about our cell phone is that it’s battery is garbage, so in the event of an emergency it’s highly unlikely I’d be able to get it to work anyway).

My sister, deciding that pay phones weren’t for her anymore, was the first one to decide to get a cellphone. I’ve looked into cell phones in the past, and was completely unable to justify the costs involved. There’s no way it’s worth $30/month for me to have one.

What she found (and I hadn’t counted on) was a new player entering the cellular phone market, namely Virgin Mobile. As stupid as I feel walking around with a phone that says “virgin” on it, you can’t beat the price.

Virgin has three different “pay as you go” plans (one of which is stupid and won’t be addressed here). The first one is the “day-to-day” plan. They charge you a 40 cent fee per day for the “privilege” of advertising yourself as a member of Virgin; and in return you get a minute rate of $0.10/minute. That’s pretty good, if you talk for a few minutes every day the costs aren’t too high.

However, I intend on using my phone very little, so I decided to go with the “minute-to-minute” plan. No fee per day, just $0.25/minute for the first 5 minutes of calling every day, then $0.15/minute after that. For anyone who has ever used a pay phone, you’d have realized that most calls last less than a minute, and almost certainly less than two (usually, they seem to consist of, “Yep, it’s done, pick me up” or “Hey, I’m gonna be late”)(Pay phones only give you three minutes to complete a call for 25 cents, have you ever had your time run out?). This makes the cost almost reasonable.

One of the big benefits of this phone, however, is that incoming text messages are free. Why’s that good? Well, I redirected some of my email accounts to send a message to the phone when one is received. That means that people can contact me for free in a timely fashion, simply by sending a SHORT email to my gmail account. Free is good.

Additionally, an advantage to Virgin is that, unlike Telus or Bell, their cheap, $15 top-up cards last for 120 days. That means that I can have this phone for less than $5/month.

At the price point of $5/month, I can handle it. Just don’t call me; text me.