Jumping on the Bandwagon

The technology bandwagon that is.

Last Christmas I bought Sarah a cellphone. It was a very, very basic cellphone, and had pretty much no frills at all. It was a folding model, but was at the absolute bottom of the heap of folding phones--The only thing under it was the non-folding ones.

When I signed her up, I went with a prepaid plan under Virgin Mobile for a couple of reasons.

• First of all, Virgin Mobile is very well supported in our area and I never hear of anyone not getting a signal.
• Secondly, I wanted a prepaid plan for her because I know how tempting it can be to go nuts with mom and dad's minutes. I wanted to see how responsible she would be.

Well, she's proven to be pretty responsible with it. I have been fairly happy with her usage. She does tend (as all teenagers do) to overuse text messaging though. I was perusing the Virgin Mobile website last night and doing my usual math calculations on her usage--You know, comparing usage with other plan variations. Because she gets docked 5 cents for each text message, whether incoming or outgoing, it has reached the point where it's running about $15 a month. That's about 300 "in and out" text messages. Up to now I didn't have her on any specific text plan, just a basic phone service. They have other text plans on their website to pick from now, and I chose one that offers up to 1000 text messages per month for $9.99. That gives her a huge buffer, and gives me a $5 savings.

The real reason I went on the website though was not just to check her usage and compare deals. I was looking for a deal on a phone for (GASP!) myself. It's getting harder and harder to coordinate with her these days. Either she's off somewhere with friends or staying after school for a club or sporting event, or I'm having to work overtime or whatever. Now add to the mix the fact that I will be her after school transportation from now on, and you have the potential to have crossed signals for sure. Her mom and I decided that she would take her to school each morning and I would pick her up (when I could). This all came about this year because of the Auburn School District tightening up their boundaries between schools and dropping a few bus routes in the process. Sarah's was one of them. She actually was supposed to go to the main Auburn High School, but got waivered in to attend the new school last year. It was mostly the fact that almost all her friends were going to go up the hill to that school. The potential for transportation problems always existed just because of that reason, and now it has hit.

Anyway, back to the phone shopping. On the Virgin Mobile site, they occasionally have special sales on reconditioned phones, and that's what I was looking for. This time I must have timed it right, because they have a nice Kyocera Slider V5 phone on sale for $24 and includes $25 of prepaid air time! How can you lose on a deal like that? I ordered one for myself, and one for Sarah to replace her old one. While it's not "feature rich" like a new camera phone, it does have lots of better features than her old one. In addition, there is also one important feature on it that I wanted her to have: the built-in GPS locating service for the 911 operators. I'm sure it's basic and included on most phones now, but it isn't on her old one.

I'll end up getting a free phone for myself, and a free phone for Sarah. Okay, it's not quite "free" for me because I wouldn't yet be spending any money on airtime, but in Sarah's case, the airtime purchase would happen on a regular basis anyway, so I might as well get a free phone with it, right? If Teresa gets a wild hair, maybe she'll sign herself up and use Sarah's old phone. She still doesn't get how much trouble it might save her. She just sees the $$$ signs.

Yep, I'm one of the last cell phone holdouts, but it was inevitable. I was just waiting for the right time and the right deal.