My buddy and I were joking about this last night. Our cel phone plans cost more than all of our other utilities put together, and cost more than our life insurance. The real kicker is that whenever we get a phone call, the response is usually, “call me back on my land line, this call will cost too much!”
$80/month and we can’t use the phone lest we want to pay even more!
The gunwales are a work in progress while I wait to get a hold of a drill press so I can add some decent drain holes/slots. In the meantime, I’ve finished making the seat frames and need to drill some holes and paint the wood with urethane prior to caning.
I managed to get the first seat joined and glued last night. I opted to try and do mortise and tenon joints. I was a bit reluctant to do this because I’m not much of a craftsman but the other options were much more appetizing. I thought a simple lap joint might not be as nice and I didn’t want monkey around with holes and dowels. The dowels would be a good way to go if I had a drill press (mmmm, drill press). Anyways, I sucked it up, bought a 1/4″ chisel, put my dado blade on the table saw and went for it. I sharpened the chisel with my Norton water stones and I must say that I got what I paid for when I bought the $10 chisel from Rona. The blade couldn’t hold a good edge very well at all. No worries though, it still works.
First I practiced and did a test mortise on some scrap wood. Using the width of the chisel as the width of the mortise, I then set the height on the dado blade to make a matching tenon. It only took a few minutes to cut the four tenons. It took around 2 hours to cut all four mortises and epoxy it all together. My work wasn’t perfect but I hope that after sanding the joints will look good. One change for the next seat is that I should put a layer of epoxy on the tenon before coating it with thickened epoxy for gluing (white microfibres as the thickener).
Having never used mortise and tenons before, I’m not sure how “right” my joints were. The tenons slid in easily but I don’t think there was any slop, especially after the seat frame is assembled.
So I’ve been thinking about canceling my cell phone. The bottom line isn’t very pretty: $25 for the voice plan, $30 for the data, the outrageous $7 service fee and then there are taxes. That’s a lot of money to spend for a guy that hardly talks on the phone and has the internet at home. It’s embarrassing that my wife and I pay more for our cell phones that all of our other utilities combined.
I called Rogers today to try and cancel, and boy was it difficult and I haven’t been able to do it. Rogers says we’re under contract until Jan. 2012 and they will charge us $500 to cancel. Apparently a change that I made in January triggered a three year contract renewal. The change was switching to a family plan which saved us $5 or $10. Prior to this, our phones were considered separate deals and my phone line was not under a 3 year contract. By switching to the family plan, this supposedly triggered a contract renewal for both phones. As much as I may not like it, a deal is a deal… However, there are some problems with this. First, Rogers is holding us to some very specific and non-obvious clauses to the contract and it’s their right to do that. However, it is my right to do the same. The problem is that after speaking with customer service, accounts receivable and the tracking department, no one in Rogers has a copy of our contract. They just say we have one. That’s a pretty big problem as far as I can tell. Not only do I think they cannot enforce a contract that no one has, but it also means that it is impossible for me to review the contract to ensure that what they say is correct.
Another contract problem is that I want to cancel my data plan. I signed up for the 6gb promo plan last summer. I also signed up for Mercy. In both cases, and in multilple phone calls I was assured that I was committed to these plans for 1 year and there was a $100 early cancellation fee. Now Rogers is saying this is not possible, and that it had to be a 3 year contract. I know with certainty that I made 4 phone inquiries on these data promotions and each time I was told the same thing.
I’m not sure what I’ll do next. I may call customer service again, reiterate my plans and ask to speak with managers. Originally I was going to switch to a pay as you go plan, but I’m willing to accept their cheapest voice plan if they waive the $7 service fee.
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