"Please, I’m begging you.”

When he saw the phone bill, he grabbed his cell phone and smashed it on the floor.

We have 3 cell phones on our plan, one for Sean, one for me, and one for Mandy, our teenaged daughter. We have a certain amount of minutes to share, and a certain amount of money that we feel is enough to throw towards cell phone usage. And that’s it.

When we received last month’s bill it was abnormally high, partly because we had exceeded our minutes, and partly because I had been making calls to Mandy while Sean and I were vacationing in Jamaica. So Sean gave Mandy a warning that she needs to limit her usage before nine o’clock during the week. Nights and weekends are free, and we only really need it for emergencies anyway. “When you’re at home, just use the house phone,” he told her.

It was the first time we had ever gone over.

So when the phone bill arrived this month, and it was $330 more than it should have been (bringing us up to a whopping $417), my dear husband became a raging bull. And his cell phone suffered the brutal consequences.

Sean wanted to withhold Mandy’s birthday presents next month to repay the overage. I said I’d rather have her work off the excess phone charges. Not giving her any presents just makes a sad birthday and doesn’t necessarily teach her anything. Doing chores around the house might give her a better understanding of just how long it takes to earn the kind of money that she wasted chatting on the phone with her boyfriend. $330 worth of vacuuming, mopping, dusting, and scrubbing the bathrooms is a lot of work. In another week or two there will be yard work to do as well. It will probably take her until the summer to repay the money, even at the very generous rate of $10 per hour. Sean agreed.

********

The next day Sean went to Best Buy to plead his case. He showed the guy behind the counter his mangled mess of a phone and explained that he needed a new one.

“Did you… drop it?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“When I saw the phone bill, I grabbed my cell phone and smashed it on the floor.”

“Well who used up all the minutes?”

“My teenaged daughter.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Listen, you have to help me out here, man. From January until now, I’ll be spending about a thousand dollars on the cell phone bill. I just can’t justify another fifty bucks to replace my phone. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Alright, let me see what I can do.”

So he went into the back and came out with a new phone.

“Here you go. I’m just going to tell them that it wasn’t working properly and needed to be replaced. I feel for ya man. Good luck.”

Once again, honesty is the best policy.




"You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance."

– Franklin P. Jones