Yesterday I got my cel phone bill. My carrier is Cingular. I got my cel phone back when Southwestern Bell had cel carriage here in the DFW area, and then they got bought out by Cingular, so I’ve been there since. Anyway, the bill came in a new smaller envelope. When I opened it, it had one of those inserts about “Here’s how to read your new bill”.

Great. Whenever I need instructions to read my new bill, it means that it’s gonna be a mess. So I looked at the flyer, and it says something along the lines of a new faster to read format, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen that. It never really makes any difference.
So I looked at the bill. You know what? They actually did what they said. My cel phone bill is actually readable now. The old one was a fiasco of trying to find out where my actual used minutes was. Not anymore. It’s well laid out, I can find the info I want quickly. I was stunned! You believe it? A big company doing something right. Now if they could do something about the fact that about 33% of my cel phone bill is TAX, then I’d be really happy!

OK, after posting this I decided to look at my cel phone bill. Here’s the breakdown of all the charges….

My rate plan is $29.99 a month.

The next section is “Credits, Adjustments, & Other Charges”. It breaks down like this:
0.50 – 911 Service Fee (OK, that’s fine, I don’t mind that one)
0.74 – Federal Universal Service
0.56 – Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee
0.18 – Texas Infrastructure Fund
1.08 – Texas Universal Service
Total of this section – $3.06

The next section is “Taxes”
0.98 – Federal Excise Tax
2.04 – State Sales Tax
0.33 – Local Sales Tax
0.33 – Local Special Purpose District Tax
Total of this section – $3.68

That means the total I pay on top of my plan is $6.74. That’s nuts. WHAT THE HELL DO ALL OF THESE MEAN? I know I could probably call Cingular and find out, but I don’t want to. Just looking at them, I just want to scream. It doesn’t seem like a lot. The only ones I think that look OK are the 911 service fee, and the state sales tax. Somehow I doubt much of anything would change if these were removed from my bill.

ARGH!