essay

I never really find myself questioning any of my bills, the prices normally only change month to month by only a few cents and for the most part I have them automatically withdraw from my checking account so I know they always get paid on time. But one time going through my bank account I noticed that my cell phone bill kept going up. Sometimes it was in $10 increments other times I saw an increase of $25. Seeing I work night shift a lot and rarely have time to go ask about a bill. I decided to print my bill and look for the problem. There I found what the problem was, I kept going over my monthly allowed data usage.

I printed the bill out, all 21 pages of it, and looked for what was happening. I have 4 lines on my account so I needed to figure out who was going over and how. Upon searching I noticed that 2 of 4 lines did not even use the data and those two lines were tablets and those tablets tend to stay in my apartment where they are always connected to Wi-Fi. I then start flipping through the other pages in the bill and looked for the last 2 lines, which are cellphones and there it was; both lines were using more data than they should, unfortunately for me the bill doesn’t explain what apps or time of day the data is being most used but I had an idea of what was happening. I googled ways to reduce using data on cell phones and that’s where I learned how to turn off certain features on apps that will constantly run in the background, or ways to download playlists I created on music apps such as Spotify and Apple Music so where if I am listening to them I am not using any data. I also thought about doing the simplest and most common thing, look for free Wi-Fi when I am out and about. Most coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores and my place of work have free Wi-Fi, I just have to set my phone to notify me when it wants to connect to a network and say its ok and then I won’t have to worry about using my data.

Similar situation happened with my high speed internet provider. I stream a lot of TV and Movies. The cable company gave me a courtesy call when I was getting close to go my allowed usage and gave me tips to reduce my risk of going over by not streaming in HD and just watch everything in standard definition. It worked, I am nowhere near going over my data anymore.