Are You Kidding Me

I think I blogged about my problems in Chicago on my last trip to the U.S. with the kids. To recap, my flight to Cincinnati was cancelled and I was able to get on a flight to Dayton instead. I tried to get in touch with my family to let them know of the change, but couldn't. I didn't have my cell phone with me, so I was using a pay phone. Finally, I called my friend Dave. I ended up calling collect because I didn't think of buying a calling card until after I spoke to him. Laugh if you want, but I'd been up about 24 hours straight with the three kids. In any case, Dave accepted the charges and was able to get in touch with mom and dad. They were able to pick me up and as the saying goes, all's well that ends well. Well, not exactly.

Last night I was having dinner with Dave, Robyn, Joe, Barb and Anna at the Cafe Mediterranean. Not a bad place, by the way. Dave asked me to guess how much he was billed for the collect call. After I made a few errant guesses, he told me the charge was $41 for a three minute phone call. That's almost fourteen dollars a minute unless my St. Philip honed math skills are failing me.

Dave was rather displeased by this charge and called the carrier. They told him that the charge was collect, and that surely he and I had been informed of the cost at the time of the call. That would be false. Dave told them that he was not paying the bill. The told him that they would drop it if he agreed never to accept a collect call from them again. I know it had to be a hard decision for him. Gee, not a real hard decision.

I guess its a good thing that we didn't decide to catch up while on the phone. I mean if we had talked an hour, would the bill have been over eight hundred dollars?

Overall its a pretty shitty practice. Who would expect to get billed $41 for a three minute call? I'm sure that the proliferation of cell phones has killed the pay phone business, but its hard to feel a lot of sympathy with business practices like that.

As a side note, I bought a $20 calling card and used it several times at the pay phone. The per minute charge was pretty reasonable, but for each call originating from a cell phone they charged $1.50.