And this just in: Randy has unexpectedly taken a second line with T-Mobile and is throwing out his Verizon land line! News at 11!

Or keep reading…

Here was the quandary: how can I make people on two coasts happy, when it comes to phone numbers?

My cell phone is still a Connecticut based device, with a phone number that I’ve had for over four years. It’s a T-Mobile account – it was a “new” VoiceStream account; they had just changed their name from OmniPoint – so it’s a GSM phone… and that’s the main reason why I still have that same number: I’m on my 14th handset since I opened the account but never had to do anything but move a SIM chip between them.

When I looked at my phone bills from last year, I found that over 75% of the people that called my cell are people in the CT area codes, even after moving out of CT. When I first got to WA, I had decided to keep the CT account active; until I got settled, I didn’t want to have to change numbers mid-stream on people. Bad enough that my movers couldn’t find me once I got out of temporary housing much less if I changed my one “constant” phone number? After I got settled in an apartment, I figured I’d change to a WA cell number in ’05, since I’d be back in CT for the holiday season. Now it’s almost the end of February and I started thinking “well, if I move, I should keep at least one number the same until it’s done…”

When I first moved into my apartment (my long term “temp” housing – I didn’t think I’d rent for very long) they ran down a list of things to do, one of which was turning on the phone jacks. I called Verizon and had them create a new account; was a free setup and they gave me a local WA number, which I started giving to people in the area. Things were good for a while.

Then this past week I noticed two things: one is that 75% of the numbers on my T-Mobile bill are still from CT. And I noticed what my recent Verizon bill.

Why in the hell have I been paying Verizon $36-38 a month for a phone line that I rarely use?! And I mean rarely use. For almost anything. I’ve called for pizza on it twice. I called a couple of local offices when I first moved in. I’ve been called on it by a couple of work people and a few friends, but most try the cell phone too. In fact, I think the ‘goat has called me on it more than anyone else and even that can’t be more than a half dozen times: most people don’t bother with it since they know my cell phone almost always gets answered. If I’m not home, it’s a guarantee; if I’m home, it’s still a good bet. And for all the people in CT, they never should bother calling it, since I still have a local number for them to call!

All of this lead to a simple question: can I add an addition phone line (with a WA number) to my existing T-Mobile account (which has a CT number) and tell the new phone to always forward the calls to the existing phone? My thought on this is that people in CT can still make a local call to get in touch with me. WA people can call a local WA number that would route calls to my CT cell phone. And I don’t have to carry two phones. Best of both worlds right?

Yeah, right. And now the complications:

T-Mobile says I have 500 Call Forwarding minutes each month. Does that mean that when I get a call that is forwarded and then talk for 25 minutes, am I using 1 minute or 25 minutes from the 500 Call Forward cache? I got mixed answers on that at my local T-Mo store: the final opinion was that I would be using 1 minute of the Call Forwarding minutes, but that remains to be seen.

What happens if I run out of Call Forwarding minutes? I start using minutes from the WA account’s Any Time bucket. That’s OK for now, but I’ll have to monitor that for a while because if we’re wrong about the Forwarding minute idea, that could ramp up really fast.

If local WA callers call my WA cell number and that forwards to my CT cell, are they charged long distance for calling a CT number? A complete unknown and a huge problem, if that’s the case… again, more monitoring is involved.

If they are charged, what do I do then? I stop forwarding calls and use the cell phone as my new home number from now (and for a year, since there’s a contract involved). Not too bad, since the new plan is 1/2 of what the Verizon land line was… and I hardly use it anyway, so I can just leave the thing around the house. Oh, and T-Mo gave me a phone (Motorola V180 – not too bad) as part of it, too, so yay! And when I travel, I can take my “home phone” with me, which is sorta neat. Finally, if I do have to use the phone this way, and I get a Bluetooth phone to host the new SIM, I can use the same Bluetooth headset that I have for the AudioVox SMT5600 and use that around the house. So, there’s little downside to it, IMHO.

Can I keep the same number that Verizon gave me? Yep. That’s true and the transfer is in progress already.

So what happens next… another ongoing list of results. Right now the new phone line doesn’t even show up at My T-Mobile and my phone number hasn’t transfered yet… I do think, though, that it’s worth sharing the results either way.

And as usual, all of this tech stuff keeps eating into my Halo 2 time!