Previous
My brilliant solution initially seemed like a screw-up, though. I was activating the i_____ "in the comfort and privacy of my own living room" as the marketing copy says, and then at the end I was told I'd flunked AT&T's credit check. I was peeved, because my credit is fine, and in the privacy of my living room there weren't any pimply phone-company flunkies to argue with (and the call center was closed.) At first I thought it was some kind of Computer Error.
Then I remembered that Diana and I had gotten our credit reports locked a few years ago. You can write letters (by snail-mail) to the credit agencies telling them not to let anyone see your credit report. This almost eliminates junk credit-card offers, and keeps sleazy people who've gotten your SSN from using it to get lots more information. But as I realized, it did mean that AT&T couldn't access my credit report either.*
But that turned out to be a good thing. Because if (and only if) you don't qualify for a regular service plan, AT&T will offer you instead the month-to-month "GoPhone" plans. These are supposedly suckier because they come with fewer minutes and you pay more per extra minute; but they're cheap, and I don't make a lot of voice calls so I don't care about having "only" 200 minutes a month. Adding on the $20 data service, it comes to $50 a month.
So I got an ****** without a service contract, and I'm saving $10 a month. Score!
It seems like anyone else could do this too (who lives in one of the states that allows credit-report locking); the drawback is you have to plan ahead, writing to the credit agencies several weeks in advance.
* This reminds me of Ann Lamott's classic retort to an angry letter-writer who took offense at one of her restaurant reviews: "Does ____ realize that if she cancels her subscription, she won't get the magazine anymore?"
Tags: iphone
