bitter magnet

just found out this morning that MIT Housing is going to restore inward phone access in the dorms, such that we can receive incoming calls via our landline). yay!! :) you see, last semester, they started charging people in the dorms $17 per month (a rip off, if you ask me) for this type of access, and i guess students (as well as parents) got so pissed off about it that Housing quickly decided to revert back to the old system. the thing is, basic local phone service had always come free with the dorms, and the rents in the dorms (at least the graduate ones) were already going up, so the extra fee seemed really unfair. i guess Housing's reasoning was that practically every student had a cell phone, so that it was not very cost efficient to provide a service for free that was almost rarely used. however, i don't think they anticipated getting complaints by irate parents not being able to reach their children just because her/his cell phone was dead (or was lost, etc), or from frustrated students who couldn't take any calls for a week or so because she/he happend to run out of minutes on her/his cell phone. i personally didn't care so much at first, but soon realized that it was indeed a pain to have to use my cell phone for all my calls (i ended up getting a hands-free set so i wouldn't have to strain my arm holding a tiny piece of almost-hot-enough-to-melt plastic next to my ear for, say, 30 minutes). and it was even more of a pain to go and change my info for "local phone number" on my credit cards, bank account, amazon.com account, etc since i would no longer be able to receive calls on my landline. and yeah, i did worry what would happen in case i ever lost my cell phone, or if it decided to go on the fritz for a day or two.

but now, alas, i guess Housing saw the light and decided to make inward calling free again. yay! hopefully all the telemarketers who used to call me on my landline have given up and so i'll start with a clean slate. one can only hope! :)