Working on a railroad for a dollar a day

[austin_dern]

I don't use my home phone much; about the only person I need to call is the taxi to the airport, and nobody calls me because I never gave out my number. That doesn't mean nobody calls me, it's just they'll sometimes take as much as two dozen rings before accepting that I won't answer. But the happy side effect is I get extremely low phone bills. When I still had the apartment in Troy, New York, Bell Atlantic and AT&T only bothered sending a bill once every three months.

I may have overdone it this past month, though. My SingTel bill came to $0.35. And, remember, the Singapore dollar is weaker than the US one, so we're talking an expense below that of the postage involved. I tried paying the bill through the payment stations, but it turns out they don't accept payments of under one dollar. So I overpaid, and suppose I've got part of the next two months' bills paid.

On the other hand, while cleaning, I managed to lose my cable bill. It was on the table next to the sofa, and though the cable bill started out next to the SingTel bill, it's not there -- or, so far as I can find, anywhere -- now. I have got to get automated bill-pay.

Trivia: There are 601 pairs of twin primes between 100,000,000 and 100,150,000. Source: The Mathematical Experience, Philip J Davis, Reuben Hersh.

Reading: My Ten Years In A Quandary And How They Grew, Robert Benchley. ``The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense of quoted as stands.'' -- From the essay ``Quick Quotations,'' about how nobody sounds really sensible in the quotes posterity chooses to remember, and the speaker should get at least three sentences to be reasonably safe against being unjustly thought fatuous. I note in the lists of Robert Benchley quotations I see in standard compilations, the second sentence above is trimmed, and I don't know if it's because the compiler didn't get the joke, or did.

Comments

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

o/` Working on a railroad, good buddy, for a dollar a day / Gotta get my money gotta get my pay! o/`

I think my friend Telbert would like this song!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, quite likely he would. I haven't seen him in years, I think, now ... what's he up to?

It is called pre-paid.

[reptilemammal.livejournal.com]

Put in your dollar or two now and then and you're set for a few months, do like five to ten dollars and you're set for a year. You're contributing to the business than which is not a bad thing.

Automatic payment give me mixed feelings generally speaking (at least in US) as you can get really messed up on it.

For example when someone forged a copy of my Visa card (not even used my actual card). They charged my bill up to around 1000 dollar, since I was on an auto-pay even as I was questioning the charges I had to send a check every month until the charges cleared and they did even hit me with 1000 just as they cleared the charge, so I had to get reimbursed. It was a mess!

Additionally I would be even more careful since you are in a foreign country, as much as they love having you, you seriously would want to know your rights in that regard and may be at a disadvantage.

Additionally when doing an automatic payment program you give them rights and permission for corrections if they make a mistake. They can double charge you, if they mess up.

I will tell you though I do do it for two of my bills that rarely go much over a hundred. One actually offers a discount for auto-pay, so that was incentive, and having an insignifcant bill which never goes much higher than seventy dollar was another. So not having to put out checks and stamps is nice.

Re: It is called pre-paid.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, Singapore bureaucracies haven't reached the level of psychotic hatred of customers that those in the US have; GIRO payments (the standard automated things) are very well-behaved, though I will check what sorts of limits I can put on the monthly withdrawals. They're also quite nice to the foreign talent here, since if you considered non-Singaporean citizens as an ethic group we'd be the second-largest group in the country, and they're quite worried about anything that might impair the country's ability to do international ... trade ... things. The result is things like Customs Officers and even tax officials are nice, and it takes time to adjust to.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

As his plan apparently includes unlimited messaging, one Indian fellow recently set a new record for such, winding up with a 1,411 page bill (http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=81574&n_date=20050510&cat=India). (The odd delimiting in the numbers may well be deliberate - the numbers themselves correlate to other reports of the same story)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's quite a lot of messages. It's all I can do to send one or two quips a week to mongologue and that with an e-mail gateway. I have these images of him sending ``This is my 1500th message.'' ``This is my 1501st message.' ``This is my 1502nd message.'' ... and so on.

I can't figure out the weird formatting there. That's strange.

[chahala.livejournal.com]

Gezz... you know that sounds extreamly cheap? Over here the phone company wants to charge a $10 minimum fee to 'have' a phone... even if you never use it. One of the reasons that I movied to vonage myself... now I can call people all over the US and it will not cost me a dime.

Love!

Chahala

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah; I don't know why there isn't a monthly charge for the connection. I'd have sworn there were in the past, and I know my typical bill will be on the order of S$20 or so. Maybe it was a promotional thing I didn't hear about.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit curious as to why you don't speak on the home phone, unless it seems to be a critical need. And.. since I see you mentioned this was a habit in New York as well.. how long it's been so. Is it more use of the office phone, or just not using phones in general?

Mind, I'm not criticizing. I'm not much of a phone initiator myself. I usually wait until calle,. and have about a 10-minute limit before I get twitchy- save for my sister or father, when conversation with them gets properly in gear. Then, hours can be spent.

I'm much twitchier on my cell phone, yet, given the price structure: $0.25 a minute for the first 10 minutes of the day, then $0.10 a minute therafter. Coupled with a soft 'beep' at the 50th second of each minute for warning, and I must constantly leave the impression that I'm fending off the hottentots, and now really isn't a good time, bye now *dialtone*. Once I'm into the 10-cent zone, though, that fades.. it's just that getting there is $2.50.

Impressive indeed that there's no 'minimum' charge for your phone bill. Currently- if I made no outgoing long distance calls- my phone bill would run about $68 a month. Granted that's with DSL included and a three-way calling and caller ID plan Mom'goose insists upon, but even minus those, it would shake out to about $25 a month. I recall my second line being about that, in pre-DSL days.

Oh, and I do appreciate quips and commentary, Austin. I won't likely respond to any, as incoming messages are free to the phone, but outgoing costs $0.10. (one of the reasons that 'live' conversations with, say, Drake tend to run about 1.8 of his messages to 1 of mine via SMS. That, and he spills over the 125-character limit with ease, where I'll start mentally editing with 30 characters left.)

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I can't give much good reason for not using the phone at all; it's not a home versus office thing either. I suppose part of it is simple convenience; nearly all the people I would talk to I know through the Internet anyway -- or, since moving to Singapore, I know them that way now -- so it's silly to call them when I can e-mail instead.

But I didn't care for the phone before, either, and can't give much reason. Maybe it's just the implied urgency of a response a ringing phone. I don't like having to be at someone's beck and ball. I may choose to be, but as a matter of choice. I don't respond to e-mail right away either, and if it's not from a student I'll typically wait till the next day for my answer.

I know you appreciate the quips, by the way. I was thinking of what messages that Indian fellow could be sending that they piled up so; I couldn't think of that many different things to write in a short while, particularly over a telephone dial.

What you don't call...

[reptilemammal.livejournal.com]

For example here we have 99 cents cards that charge only 3.9 a minute to call Signapore. I was pondering using it just to give a verbal hello and such, but if you're just going to ignore my call...

I mean do you at least respond if someone leaves you a voice mail?

Also, the fact is text based conversation can convey many things, however I have found that more discussion be made over a shorter period of time when actually verbally talking to someone.

The next level of communication is that of actually meeting with the person and talking with them.

For example I don't know how many iterations it might of taken to find out that Gil knew you when you were in Albany. I am pretty sure, this would not of came up in a text based conversation.

And you folks think of me always curling and my ball and keeping to myself hmph. :P)

Re: What you don't call...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've never responded to voice mail, but that's because I haven't got the service. I have responded to voice mail in the past, when I had it, though, and found it more convenient than an answering machine.

I'd answer your call certainly, but it'd be advisable to let me know when ou plan to call, since that way I can be reasonably sure I'll be home to answer it, among other things.

Gilead I knew where he was because I happened to mention online my location to chipuni, who it turned out was two floors below me, and leapt up eagerly. Where he knew Gilead from I don't know exactly.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, especially given long-distance, yes. email seems preferable in a number of ways.. or the instant communication of FurryMUCK, IRC, etc.

I'm rather prompt with email response, though I'm terrible at initiating email. You can tell I'm much better at response, from the cvolume of our conversation that occurs in your LJ versus mine.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Odd as it may be, I think I'm better at responding than I am initiating conversations. I do try to write something daily, but almost all of what I write is really a response to stuff I see, rather than something that comes from my imagination or that directly explores my personality. And then there's the way I'm left off-balance if there's a comment here I just can't reply at all to. An odd number of comments to any of these posts gets under my compulsive skin frightfully.