It's Really Clean

Don't try this at home. Brigid and I combined on a really big mistake. She left her cell phone in her jeans pocket when she put her clothes into the laundry basket, and I neglected to check the pockets before tossing the clothes into the washing machine. Yikes! Ron discovered the misdeed when he put the clothes into the dryer and then heard a terrible clunking sound.

Cell phones don't like to get wet. We took the battery off and let it dry out overnight, but it was still nonfunctional the next day.

So we trudged off to the cell phone store to buy her a new phone. We decided that since Brigid and I were equally at fault, we'd each have to pay half. Well, when you buy your cell phone as part of a service plan, they sell the phones really cheap. I think we paid about $50 for Ron's phone, and we got mine and Brigid's free. We were unprepared for the regular retail prices! Brigid ended up choosing the least expensive phone for $150, but it's not as nice as her original phone (i.e., no camera). But at least it's a phone.

Fast-forward a few days. I decided to look at her washed phone and noticed that the screen was now dry. I tried to turn the phone on—and it turned on! I looked through her contacts list—and they were all there! I tried to make a call—and it sort of worked: I got a recording saying this phone wasn't in service (since her service was transferred to her new phone), but the call to wherever the recording comes from did go through! I then tried to take a picture—and it worked, too!

So we trudged off to the cell phone store again to return the new phone. The store manager said we could definitely return the phone, but he suggested that we wait the full fifteen days of the return period just to be sure Brigid's old phone was really working. That sounded reasonable, but so far so good, and now we're planning to return the new one on Friday.

Brigid is really happy, of course. That was an awful lot of money that she'd much rather spend on video games and manga. And she and I are both being fanatical about checking pockets before doing laundry!

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We have free nationwide calling in our cell phone plan. So we haven't been using our home phone to make long-distance calls anymore. After two months of not using our long-distance company and not exceeding our cell plan's minutes, we decided we could definitely cancel that service.

So I called our long-distance company. Suddenly I was offered a no-monthly-fee plan with 50 "free" minutes each month, then 7¢ a minute after that. We'd have to pay taxes and fees on the 50 "free" minutes as we used them, so they aren't completely free. Interesting how the really good deals come out when you tell them to cancel your service.