You obviously need to know this about me. I have a cellular telephone. I have a land line at my apartment.

The cellular telephone is to be used for communication purposes wherever I may be at that particular moment. The land line was originally installed as a way to direct telemarketing calls to my answering machine, create an easy way for family to get a hold of me and leave messages, and a portal to 9-1-1 just in case. If you call Ma Bell and insist on picking your features ala-carte, you can get bare-bones telephone service with caller ID for less than $20 a month. Local calls within a five mile radius cost only $0.03 cents a call. However, after a few years of having almost-impossible telephone conversations in my apartment on the cellular phone (standing on the couch by the window is not a comfortable speaking position), I thought long and hard about whether to expand my land line’s calling power beyond that radius.

Ma Bell offers long distance packages at reasonable prices depending on your use. I was deciding between paying; (a) $2/month to call around the country at $0.12 per minute and; (b) $10/month for 120 minutes of call time. The break even point there is about 67 minutes. That means option B makes more sense as long as you make 68 minutes worth of telephone calls. I do like getting more bang for my buck. So I now have 2 hours a month in which to make calls from my apartment…we’ll see if I make this venture worth it.

As close friends probably know by now, I’m not one to spend much time on the telephone machine (thanks in part to two medium-distance relationships in my life). Why call and just talk when you can make plans and catch up then? I (still) abhor public telephone conversations, so the cellular telephone is used mostly as a locater and planning device (I have about 70 hours of constant rollover on my cellphone) with calls never lasting more than a few minutes.

The irony here is that between the ages of eleven and eighteen, jockeying for telephone position at the house was a constant battle. A second line was never an option. Now I sit with two telephone lines that I barely use…but that might change. I have years of catching up to do with friends in different places. Are you on that list? Stay tuned.