Searching for cell phone service in Pembroke

By Lawren Shepard
Entertainment Editor

All I wanted to do was call home, like a good daughter.

You know how mothers get when they don’t hear from you. I usually start getting threatening emails
if a week and a half or so goes by without a phone call.

Hey, it’s understandable. They’re mothers, they worry.
But what really worried my mother was the $400 phone bill from Sprint she received last month.
You might say that worried me just a little bit, too.

After an hour on the phone to the good people at Sprint, I managed to get
some answers.

Apparently, Pembroke is just a teensy bit about three outside the Sprint
coverage area, contrary to what I was told at the store where I chose this phone and the deceptively
named “calling plan.”

Plan? What plan? Where was a $400 phone bill in this plan?
You would think that no roaming charges would mean “No Roaming Charges.” However, here, it
apparently means “no roaming charges as long as you’re using Sprint towers.”

And therein lies the rub. There are no Sprint towers within range of Pembroke.

The entire time I was chatting about upcoming midterms, laughing with my friends over the melee of the
California election, or calling to order a pizza, my phone was roaming on (gasp) other services’ towers.

And the price of my little red cell phone’s indiscretions totaled to more than four times my normal phone bill.

Now, my phone is set back to Sprint services only. Meaning, instead of my phone roaming, I am the one
roaming-driving down the road 2 to 3 miles every time I make a call.

If I attempt to use it on campus, the little display screen on my Nokia only reads “searching for service.”

And so I, too, am searching for service— searching for a cell phone service that actually provides service
to Pembroke and has fewer lines of fine print in the contract.

There may be one silver lining to this. I can’t call home, which is a blessing in disguise, as I’m a little afraid to.

A $400 phone bill?