My cheap mother hated giving me rides before I got a driver's license. That's why I got to ride the school bus with 19-year-old drug addicts (somehow still attending high school) who would sexually harass me every day. Sometimes I would miss the bus on purpose just for the privilege of walking 2 miles to school, until we moved farther away and it wasn't an option. Plus, I had to make sure my dumb brother didn't get in fights and stuff on the bus.
Anyway, sometimes I had after school activities to attend (though not often--again, my cheap mother hated driving me around, but more on that later), so I needed a ride home. This was especially problematic when I couldn't be exactly sure when I'd be finished. Heaven forbid my mother show up before I was done and have to wait for 10 minutes! Instead, she wanted me to call when I was done, so I could wait for 10 minutes.
Now here's the funny part. I obviously did not have a cell phone. In fact, my mother was too cheap to buy a calling card or give me quarters for the payphone. Instead, I had to call her collect, and use the two seconds in which you say your name to say that I needed a ride. She would then reject the call, and hopefully come pick me up, thereby cheating the phone company out of a free 2 second call.
The good news is, sometimes I actually needed to get in touch with her about something, and having no recourse, was forced to call collect over and over until she finally accepted the charges. So she probably ended up paying more than she would have with the quarters. Sometimes my cheap mother gets what she deserves.
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1 comment:
wow, I completely forgot about the collect calls. I somehow remembered the later days in college when I would get calling cards for special events, to be used only to call her, but I completely forgot about calling collect all the damn time. Must have blocked that one out.
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