I just received the monthly bill from my mobile-phone company. It covers the period from early May to early June. This time the total charge is seventy-two pounds, of which fifteen is for the subscription, and ten is the value-added tax. The most striking feature of the bill is the listing of calls. Every single one of them is a text message. Most of these go to several people only. There were four-hundred and twenty seven of them in the billing period. Each text message, no matter whether national or international, nominally costs ten pence. However, when everything is included, the cost per message is close to seventeen pence. This is nearly double the nominal price. One way or another, the phone company has to make a living. I only wonder how much more I would spend if I ever talked into the damned phone.

Addendum (February 11, 2004)

Today I got my monthly mobile-phone bill. Since last summer, the company is no longer British but Croatian. Well, it is actually German, but that is irrelevant in this connection. In this billing period, going from early January to early February, I had four-hundred and fifty-five text-messages and one call of forty-two seconds. By the way, the call went to my insurance company. The total charge is a bit less than two-hundred kunas, or a bit more than eighteen pounds. Each text-message nominally costs twenty lipa or one-fifth of a kuna. But when everything is included, such as the monthly subscription and the value-added tax, the cost per message is about forty-two lipa. This is a bit more than double the nominal price. Once again, the phone company has to make a living. The only encouraging thing is that one kuna is worth a bit less than ten pence. That is, the price of text-messages I am paying in Croatia is roughly a quarter of the price I used to pay in Britain. Of course, this is good only for me, or those few like me who get their money from abroad, as Croatians earn about a tenth of what the British earn. The damned phone, indeed.