When I was younger, cell phones were a big deal. And I mean “big” as in they were huge and incredibly rare unless you were a lawyer, doctor, or pimp. When my family finally got into the cell phone market (one of my parents is in medicine ), we had two separate phones.  What’s the point of having just one if there’s no one to call.  It came in handy on Boy Scout trips when someone needed to be picked up and as a just-in-case-we-get-lost on family vacations.

I didn’t have my first cell phone until college (as a sophomore).  Even then they were expensive, and the “free nights and weekends” plan didn’t work for my family.  Everyone but me was typically in bed by 8pm, so if your free minutes didn’t start until after then, there was no point.

Then Verizon announced it was lowering prices and lowering the evening time to 7pm.  Suddenly my entire family had cell phones on the same family plan.  It made it easy to get in touch with one another, and the multitude of minutes now available made life much easier for me at school (no one else used our plan but me).

Years later, I’m still on the family plan.  This is a matter of convenience, really.  I spend $15 a month on my phone rather than spending the $40 minimum I’d need to if I had my own plan.  Unfortunately, we only have 700 minutes between all of us, and my family has actually started using their phones.  We come really close to that buffer each month, but I do a fairly good job of tracking our usage to keep from going over.

Or so I thought …

Last month, we used a total of 695 minutes.  I kept logging in to the Verizon website to keep my eye on this number, too.  ”Usage 695/700″ with a lot of exclamation points behind it to remind us we were that close.  I even bought a Skype phone number so I could make business calls without exhausting our minutes.  Well, February 10th comes and we get a new allotment.  Whew!  I start using my phone again, albeit more judiciously during the day and waiting until 7:01pm to make long calls to co-workers.

Then we get our phone bill …

With $10.80 in overage charges!  Apparently, last month was a “partial month.”  We were only allotted 671 minutes rather than our usual 700.  Each minute over the 671-minute cap costs us an additional $0.45 (the average per-minute cost within the cap is only $0.03).  Let me point out that nowhere in our contract, nowhere in our previous month’s bill, and nowhere in Verizon’s online account management system is this “partial month” limit posted.  Here we thought we were keeping things under control and they still charge us an overage fee!

A friend asked me the other day why I was so upset over this.  Think for a minute; if every customer were charged an additional $10/month, what would happen?  For most people, $10 is too small a fee (compared with the rest of the bill) to fight.  It would take more energy to sit on hold with customer support, argue with managers, and “fight the system” than $10 is worth.  So they (like my parents, the controllers of the phone plan) let the fee slip by.  Multiply this $10 by the several million accounts at Verizon, and you suddenly have a multi-million dollar windfall for the company.  Ethical?  No.  Moral?  Absolutely not.  Legal?  According to their contract.

The other issue is the start time for unlimited nights and weekends.  Originally we elected Verizon because their nights started at 7:00pm (see reasoning above).  So I wait until 7:01 to start a call, thinking I’m in the clear.  I had a long chat with a colleague about a mutual project the other night … and it showed up on my bill.  Some time in the last year or so, Verizon changed our account so that unlimited nights start at 9:00pm.  Did they tell us?  Maybe, but in an obscure way that apparently slipped by unnoticed with the rest of the legalise in their monthly account statement.  Ethical?  No.  Legal?  As long as it’s on the document, no matter how small the font, obscure the language, or indecipherable the meaning … apparently.

We’ve become addicted to cell phones.  What once was a luxury afforded only to the richer echelons of society has become a vital piece of our communication infrastructure for so many.  I could not do my job without my cell phone, and many other people are in the same situation.  Unfortunately, the cell phone companies (Verizon, in this case) are leveraging that dependency to pad their own pocket books.

I was once labeled by another marketer as an “infoential.”  Infoentials are a specific demographic of society: they tend to be about 20-35, middle to upper class, and somewhat tech-savvy.  The other defining characteristic of infoentials is that they are much more trusting of “big business” than their gen-x and baby boomer predecessors.  If companies dependent on the tech-savvy for their business keep up this kind of extortion and abuse, though, that trust will be very short-lived.