By: Rob Gindes
I guess Microsoft needed my money.
Yesterday, in my further attempts to become a real person (for the love of God, stay in college as long as you can), I was checking my bank statement and noticed an $8 charge from Microsoft. A light Googling later and I figured it out: Microsoft has been stealth-billing me for Xbox Live, a service I haven’t used in almost a year, on the 12th or 13th of every month.
First off, that’s a public service to all of you out there. If you bought a three-month subscription or something to it and then sold your Xbox or got busy or someone spilled beer on it and fried it, or whatever else happens to Xboxes, odds are that Microsoft is still charging you eight bucks a month. Yeah … it’s stuffty. Put a stop payment on it and tell Bill Gates to shove it.
It just got me to thinking, and you don’t really realize this until you’re out of college: everything is designed to rip money out of you. Everything. Your sweet old granny will steal money from you if you let her. I just ordered Verizon service for my apartment and if I had it to do over again I think I’d rather have punched myself in the face repeatedly. Verizon advertises TV and internet access for $70 per month, which is steep, but doable.
That’s, of course, only for the first six months of service, so if we’re getting technical, it’s gonna be an extra five per month. But not bad. Well that doesn’t include the charge per cable box (oh, you wanted to actually watch tv?) But by my numbers, that only works out to about $90 per month.
I’ll tell you right now, as I’m writing this, I know how much I’m paying — $100 – and I can’t tell you what that last $10 is. I guess it’s just the middle-finger charge. The choice between Verizon and their just-as-bad competitor, Comcast, is like South Park’s election between a turd sandwich and a giant douche.
Everything is designed to steal your money. I was looking at music on iTunes yesterday and they had Wale’s Back to the Feature mixtape for sale at the low, low price of $9.99. Great! Anyone decently familiar with music already knows: it’s a damn mixtape. Mixtapes are free. Mixtapes aren’t for sale. If you buy Back to the Feature on iTunes, the suggestions that come up are probably for oceanfront property in Kansas.
I’m 421 words into this rant and I haven’t even gotten to Ticketmaster, the worst of the worst, which nearly caused me to have a brain aneurysm in 2009. They should all die and burn in hell.
So there I was last night, on the phone with Microsoft for 15 minutes before I realized they were never going to answer – because they know what they’re doing – and I just feel defeated. Fine, Bill Gates, take my eight dollars. You must need it more than I do.
