Please Un-One Bill Yourself

I awarded a motorcycle and a Hot Wheels car today for Mace's first potty-training successes (he took care of #1 in the potty once last night and once tonight). Right after dinner, though, I looked over and saw him kneeling down with "the look" on his face and asked him, "Mace? Don't you want to do that on the potty so you can get another toy?" He declined. Still not worth it to him, I guess. What is it about little boys and poop?

In other Casa Flamingo news, Casey ran down the driveway again today while I chased him in the car (Mace laughing hysterically in his car seat), and I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon this morning trying to un-One Bill our house phone/internet/cable bill from our wireless phone bill. In case you have not figured this out yet, let me enlighten you on Verizon's latest tactic to stick it to you. Whenever a phone/internet/cable company offers you the "convenience" of putting all the services they offer to you on one bill, say "no." Do you remember the good old days when you got your cable from Company A, your home phone service from Company B, and your cell phone service from Company C? And if you had to cut back on your expenses, what's the first thing you cut? The cable, of course. You could just cancel it for a few months until things got better and then turn it back on. Well now, in the name of "convenience" and "bundling," these telecommunications giants like to sell you on a package deal that you cannot unravel (internet/cable/phone) without incurring a termination fee until your contract is finished. And then to "make your life even easier," they'll take your cell phone bill and combine it with your internet/cable/phone bill. Well guess what? If you can't pay the full bill -- meaning every single service that's on the ultra convenient One Bill, the company can cut everything off. All of it. All at once. To get news from the outside world, you'd have to drive to the sports bar and ask them to turn on Fox News. And good luck finding a pay phone.

A while back, when Flamingo Joe told me he had signed us up for One Bill and that we'd only be getting it online, I thought back then that I needed to undo it, but didn't want him to think I didn't trust him to make decisions. So when I was on the phone today trying to get the cable cancelled altogether (no luck -- stuck with it until August), I decided to tackle the silly One Bill problem. Do you know that they had to transfer me to no less than 6 people to accomplish it? I'm pretty sure they were hoping that I'd get sick of waiting and give up -- at one point, person #5 on the other end of the line went silent for several loooong seconds and I was convinced she'd hung up on me. I said, "Oh my goodness!!! Did you just hang up on me??" When she said, "no, I'm still here" I was really glad I had not said something awful during the long silence when I thought she had hung up and was on her way to the soda machine.

The last lady I talked to, who was the one who finally un-One Billed me, asked me why I was un-One Billing. I explained to her that should I have to make difficult choices in the future about what I was and was not going to pay, I wanted to have the option. She said yes, that was probably smart. Finally -- validation.