farbot.com

The wireless industry is probably widely hated by the general technically savvy public because of the tastes of freedom most people get using computers on a daily basis. We don't pay extra money to send messages to people that subscribe to other internet service providers. We don't pay per megabyte to download things (yet). We don't have to use specific equipment with our internet service that is created by and tailored by our ISP to prevent certain software from being run on it. We can choose different software to send and receive files or browse the web if we want.

So to keep things financially manageable we decided to keep the lowest number of minutes on our family plan and we settled on the cheapest text message plan when we resubscribed for service. I made sure to lock down both phones tightly to prevent texting to those 5-digit contest numbers that might add charges without other approval, stop the downloading of new applications, and prohibit purchasing of ring tones to keep hidden costs from surprising us. When both of our phones got $1.99 data charges this month I was unhappy and surprised. Didn't I close off every last way extra fees could seep in?

It turns out just starting up the Get It Now application on the phone will trigger the very first bytes of data to flow and start that $1.99 charge per megabyte. I've tripped over this thing a couple of times over the years, so I figured my wife had done this and my phone had gotten squashed just-so in my pocket and tripped over that menu at some point. This prompted me to do what I thought I'd already done: turn it off. After all, a coworker recently informed me just how precise and granular the parental controls over texting were, down to the minute, so this should be a walk in the park.

Except of course, that this walk in the park would mean less money for Verizon.

The helpful, polite, and English-speaking support person at Verizon explained that yes, I could turn off data service but it would prevent me from sending picture and video messages. The two are linked, and we do like to use that message plan to send each other funny pictures of our kids, so I'm stuck.

"How convenient." I spat, disgusted, and then proceeded to get the charges removed.

"Is there a way I can disable that application on my phones so that it can never run?" I was thinking my wife's new habit of letting my kids review pictures on the phone might've resulted in them tripping over this application.

"Sorry, no."

"Even better. Well, ok then, that's all I needed."

This is where an ordinary person trying to be nice would say hey, at least they agreed to toss out the charges, but that would be giving one of the richest and most profitable companies with hands in wireless, fiber optic, and DSL technologies across the country a pass on something that is obviously not fixed so they can capitalize on the laziness of consumers who will apparently just pay anything they see on their bill.