Well, that's one way to sell me a new phone plan.

[avias]

Like most of Massachusetts, I've got Verizon for my home phone provider, as well as long distance and their cheap-ass DSL, because I like nice, simple single bills. But damn, can their service be crappy sometimes. It doesn't help that I've been on the cheap and increasingly outdated plans, either. (Hell, they don't even offer the plan I was on before I moved last summer anymore. Changing my number bumped me into the nearest match, which raised my bill about five bucks a month, the bastards.) Specifically, I've been having issues with my voicemail lately. A couple weeks ago it got into the habit of delivering the messages days late, and then earlier this week it went and vanished into the ether. Which was a particular problem for me; sleeping days as I do, I've gotten into the habit of just leaving my ringer off all the time, so voicemail is pretty much how people communicate with me. Which has the upside of letting me screen out all these retards who seem to think my number is some Gerald guy's, but still. No voicemail, no mesages from work, family, friends, etc. I first noticed that it was gone Monday morning after I got home from work, and tried to use Verizon's web-based account info stuff to figure out what the hey was going on, but I was too tired to deal with the tangled mess of misdirected links and timeouts and server crashes that they call a website and let it rest for a couple days. When I checked it again yesterday morning, my voicemail wasn't even listed in the add-on services. Instead I mysteriously had Call Forwarding to a second phone that I don't have. More than that, my basic level voicemail plan- the seven messages stored for seven days one- wasn't even mentioned anywhere on the site anymore. The info page now states that plans start at the 30 message size. So I figured that they had dumped the smaller plans and just didn't bother to tell anybody, but when I called the regional customer service to ask them what the hell was going on, the (surprisingly pleasant) girl I talked to was just as confused. They do still offer the small plan, had no idea why mine stopped working, and according to her system the call forwarding was added as a web transaction right about the time the website freaked out on me Monday morning. So I have to assume that was the result of their terminally craptastic website, but who knows? She offered to just reactivate my voicemail, but seeing as I'd been pondering switching to one for months now, I just had her put me on one of the cheaper Freedom packages. That gets me the larger voicemail storage and caller ID, which'll be damn helpfull for screening out the afore-mentioned retards, and at the same price as what just the services and my local plan would've been if I had added them seperately. When considered in that light I've effectively got free long distance, and no longer have to worry about my bill spiking when my parents think I'm dead or something.

Of course, now I need to actually get a phone with caller ID capabilities. This old Easa-Phone's done me well for the last end of forever, but it's time to move on. I figure I'll stop by Target before work tonight and get something cheap, although skimming their site doesn't produce anything interesting. But then, I've found that box-store websites often skimp on the staple, low-cost items, prefering to focus on the higher-end niche stuff that they'd never move in a normal store. Stuff like, say, this. Or this. Or even this 'un. But I have to admit... this model is damn tempting. All that lovely brass and wood and functionality... But I'm not sure if I want to pay $50+ and wait for shipping for a phone. Depends on what I can find tonight, I guess...