05.14.2004 - 2:17 p.m.

When I was in high school, we had this �real life� unit where everyone looked through classified ads for apartments, furnishings, and cars, plus made a budget based on current utilities prices to figure out how much income they�d need to live the way they wanted. I think the point was to impress us with how important it was to do well in school, because we�d all want to have lots of stuff, and thus would need cushy incomes. (Insert dig at materialistic society here.) I had two jobs at the time, a minimum-wage daycare gig three times a week after school, and a less-than-minimum stablehand job on Saturdays. At the time, I figured I�d rather live cheap than go through a job search, so I found a shitty apartment, decided to live within biking distance of my jobs, and only kept the most utilitarian of utilities�electric, water, and maybe phone. If I extended my daycare job to forty a week, ate mostly rice, and never went out, I could live on my own.

The teacher was skeptical. �You forgot some of the utilities,� he pointed out.

�I can use the internet at the library,� I pointed out.

�No, I mean you forgot cable. You can�t live without cable!�

�I don�t even watch TV,� I informed him.

That�s about when he ran out of things to say.

I still think that if I ever lived all by myself, I�d skip the TV. I�ll admit that some of my other plans for frugal living were not workable�As a person, I require the occasional night out, and there�s really no reason to have a shitty apartment when you can share a less-shitty one. But I still think living that way would avoid encounters like the following:

I was on the line with the phone company for most of an hour yesterday. One of those �this call may be monitored� deals, because my phone bill was $100.39 when it should have been $38.71 or whatever. Denise, the woman I spoke to, discovered that I�ve been the victim of a billing error where I was billed once for the package I have, then separately for each item in that package, then again for having two of everything.

Denise swore to me that she could erase the extra charges and even cut our rate to the bare bones, dial-tone only level, so that our bill would really be only $17.42 every month. I was cool with this.

But it�s interesting to me that my checking account debited $100.39 not two hours ago. Now I have to work myself back up to calling them again, when I�d rather have my toes individually smashed with a hammer. See, if I just had electric and water, but skipped the phone? None of this ever would have happened.

-stonebridge

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