Mission:Impossible, pt. 3

There must be some mistake. This can't be right.

Those were my first thoughts upon opening my cell phone bill for the month after I returned from Canada. Vancouver's a mere 30 miles from U.S. soil, but the way T-Mobile and Catherine Zeta-Jones were charging me, 30 might as well have been 3000. Picking up the phone in Vancouver and calling the States had been akin to shooting myself in the leg while giving a classroom demonstration on gun safety.

Disbelief turned to outrage, and soon I was on the Internet looking for another cell phone carrier. I'd outed the smug Welsh voice from my head, and I was feverishly looking up "cell phone plan canada" and "north american cell phone plan".

Here's what I found: They're all out to get you. All your cheap minutes, free minutes, long distance, coast-to-coast minutes mean nothing once you cross that 49th Parallel. Only one cell phone carrier makes a concession, and that's Verizon. You can get a North American plan for $60 a month, but you'll get less than your usual bucket-load of minutes and you won't be able to roam into Canada. Thanks for nothing, 21st century! I felt myself floating down a current back to an earlier time of rotary phones and TV dinners.