The Phone Bill Is Here, The Phone Bill Is Here!

I suppose most people first look at the amount they owe when they get their cell phone bill. Not The Murphy Family. We look at the minute usage first thing. And why not, the amount hardly changes. This month we were even more keenly interested because there was a new entrant. In the early days of our cell phones, there were only two - one for me, and one for the funWife. The results were predictable - she always had 10x the minutes used I did. The reason was simple - I only used it to take calls from her. She used it to make calls to everybody. That and I'm a man of few words (at least when I speak them, not write them).

But then we got one for the female Fruit of the Murphy Loins, and the two women vied for first place. I would have thought that a teenager would beat a, well, not a teenager anymore, in the talking on the phone derby, but the fFotML isn't a big phone talker. It could be that in that regard she didn't fall from my tree, or it could be that other options like IM and more recently Facebook allowed her to communicate with her friends in a way other than talking on the phone (I'm not even going to mention texting, and yes, we have a special texting rate fee just because of her).

Then my numbers came up when I started to actually call people with my phone. OK, not really people, just the funWife, and I did so on special occasions like when I was dispatched to the store and couldn't remember what she wanted. I quickly learned to call and instead of admitting the real reason, I'd ask if there was something else she wanted in the hopes that what she told me already would come up:

ME: "Is there something else you wanted from the store?"
Her: "As long as you're in the baking aisle pickup up an 8 oz bag of chocolate chips, why not stroll over to the diary section and pick up some yoghurt because you ate the last one."

Of course the conversation never happened like that, and then I'd have to ask if there was a particular size or brand she wanted me to get. That never worked out either ("Size? They only come in one size" or "Brand? Whatever is cheapest"), so now I make a list. But I still ran the minutes up because if you've ever been dispatched to the grocery store, you realize that there are minimum of seven choices for any particular item, and your briefing didn't cover one of them:

ME: OK, I'm looking at the green beans in 8 oz cans, and they have all natural, low sodium, with bacon, with onions, cajun, with potatos, and lite. Which one do you want?"
HER: "Just buy plain"

So now at least I'm up to like a third of the minutes the rest of the family racks up.

But when we added my father to the mix, we got a real surprise. When we went to open bill, we figured "how many minutes can an old man use?" We expected that he might beat me the first bill just because he'd be calling for novelties sake. Well, he was numero uno - he beat the gals hands down. We just had to know. It wasn't like we were close to our minutes, but how was he averaging 10 minutes a day on his phone? As it turns out, my parents were using it like an intercom. Kind of like the communicators with the original Star Trek cast, only younger. And then lots of months he would inadvertanly use some odd service - texting, email, ringtones. He had a blast with that phone without even realizing it.

So now the male Fruit of the Murphy Loins has the phone (my mother's arthritis doesn't allow her to use the phone). So yesterday we got the first bill. Let me just say my son talks on the phone like me, only less so because (1) fewer people call him, and (2) he doesn't have a brother in California. The only call I could think of was when he was coming back from the Truman Library to let us know to pick him up. I didn't think he'd even break the 2 digit barrier on minutes. Ha, shows you how much I know, he was in contention for numero uno. I was in such shock, he might have even BEEN numero uno. Once I recover, that boy and I have to talk.

Face to face, I don't want to run up his minutes.