When my last cellphone died I bought a new smartphone from AT&T Wireless. I paid quite a bit for this phone, and it has worked well enough (awful reception at my home, but reasonable elsewhere). Even since Cingular acquired ATTW, I have never had any billing problems with them before... it is usually roughly $54 a month.

This week I recieved my bill for last month. It was for $257!! It seems that because the Microsoft recruiter was calling me from a land line (as opposed to a mobile line), Cingular counted every minute of those calls last month (over 400 minutes of it) as "overage", and billed me for it at $0.45 a minute.

First of all, I am almost certain that I would never have agreed to $0.45 per minute unless the carrier's policy was to allow a plan with higher limits to be applied retroactively (which is something Cingular will not do). I also do not recall signing a 3 year contract - only a 1 year contract, however I do not have paperwork to back this up so I am now at the mercy of their contract termination fee ($175 by itself). I feel like I am being robbed in broad daylight.

I am also pretty miffed that being recruited by Microsoft ended up costing me a few hundred dollars out of my own pocket.