My Savvy Consumer Decisions

I decided to get rid of caller ID and long-distance service from my landline. To accomplish this near-impossible feat, I stayed on hold with the phone company for 40 minutes. But geez, was the operator ever nice to me when I finally got to talk to him. He wanted to know about whether we have sunny, beautiful weather and if I enjoyed my Memorial Day holiday (ooh, I sure did, thank you very much. You went to Virginia Beach? Interesting. Good to know.). That was worth the wait. So, without caller ID and long-distance service, my bill will be $12 less each month. People have told me, "Get rid of your landline and just use your cell phone. It will be liberating." I'm not ready to be liberated, but I realized that my caller ID really isn't useful at all, and I never use my long-distance service (I'm ready to be proven wrong on both counts), so I might as well get rid of them and save a tiny little bit of money. I guess what had been holding me back was that I usually don't have an hour to spare to wait for someone from the telephone company to talk to me. So, now that I don't have caller ID, everyone, please call me and make anonymous prank calls. I won't know who you are because I got rid of caller ID. Oh, and salespeople. Please, call as much as you want now. I will most certainly pick up because I won't know it's you. It will be worth it, since I no longer have to pay $8.20 per month to avoid those kinds of things. The last era people made anonymous prank calls was probably more than 15 years ago. There's no one I really want to avoid. I never have screened my calls. I don't think I'll miss it.