Holy shit... Ride the light, but pay per photon....

I went online to check my Qwest bill this morning. Remember those Qwest commercials from the 90's where they showed that dude in the motel where he could order every movie ever made on pay-per-view, and their slogan was "Ride the light?"

It's ironic that Qwest has NO plans to bring fiber to the home like Verizon FiOS and deathstar, er, AT&T u-Verse. (I would bet a million rupees that the u-Verse name was selected in part because its easily pronounceable in Indian English because that's where you're going to call for customer service...)

But I digress. When I lived in Uruguay, especially on the farm where my boyfriend would make long phone calls during the day... I lived in FEAR of the ANTEL bill arriving. It was almost never under $1000 pesos, or at the exchange rate that time, about 40 bucks. But when you consider that teaching english I was making maybe 200 bucks in a month... that was, well, excessive.

I got a Qwest bill today that reminded me of how excruciatingly expensive those ANTEL payments were if you expressed them as a percentage of your monthly income.



Either my dog ordered a bunch of PPV movies, or my October-through-January bundled-billing screw-up finally got resolved. My bills got really LOW because they kept providing but stopped charging for one of the services. After two months I called 'em. As expected, here's the ugly surprise.

This is the downside of those convenient bundled packages that sound SO good in marketing terms but are executed SO poorly by billing software.