No thanks, guys. I think I'll pass on it, OK? Yeah, I was surfing around the Internet today, reading a few news articles here and there, when I stumbled (nearly stubbed my toe) upon an ad for a large mobile phone company. I conclude that they must have developed a technology that turned one of my monitor pixels into a camera, and they were looking at me, thinking they saw "gullible" emblazoned across my forehead.
The ad was for a FREE phone; a camera phone no less! (You might remember a previous post I did about mobile phones). Anyway, the ad said I could get one, today! I was all aflush with glee (yeah, right). Really, I was curious as to the fine print; there's always fine print.
Well, the fine print was that it was a particular model phone, and it was refurbished (read, "broke up, but we schlepped it back together and can't think of anything else to do with it than to try to schlep it off on a schlep like you"), and that it required a two-year committment (read "you commit to overpaying us 24 times, and if you don't, and want to cancel, heck, you'll pay us anyway, and you can keep the schlepped phone") And then there was the ambiguous, ubiquitous, obsequious "other restrictions apply", which basically means, "You must agree to whatever other ways we come up with to beat you down, right down to the stinking ground!"

Well, if you think I actually wanted to know what these "other restrictions" were, well...then you know me fairly well. And here they are:

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You pay us over thirty-five dollars just to sign you up (what the heck does this involve that it costs that much?) You cancel on us, even if it's because the service we provide just ain't all that good, which we can't guarantee anyway, and we'll hit you up for about four months' charges, how do you like that? Oh, and by the way, whomever you actually get the phone from (Huh? I thought it was from the company) might also charge you some fees or other if you cancel, so take out a small loan before you even think about cancelling! Oh, and while we're at it, you know those rollover minutes (yeah, those that rolled over because you never needed them in the first place)? Well, you can kiss them goodbye after your 12th billing period (whether this is the 12th period overall, or the 12th period after a particular set of minutes rolled over; don't worry about it, we'll sort that out when we bill you. Rest assured, we won't make any errors in YOUR favor). If you pay us at least forty dollars a month (you KNOW there are going to be overages, don't you?), plus taxes and all kinds of other strange, possibly imaginary fees, we'll let you talk to our other fools--check that--subscribers, for free, even if they are using a schlepped up phone like the one we're giving you. There are other restrictions also, credit approval being one. The others; ahh, don't worry about it, we aren't telling you what those are. I guess we'll just have to see how we feel when you call us. You ARE calling us, aren't you?
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Now, what really iced this cake for me was that in all this, they're going to ship me my new, used schlep-phone FREE of shipping costs (heck, that means they're basically giving me ten bucks for this awful--I mean--awesome deal). How can I possibly go wrong!