When I was about 15 my mum bought me a laptop so we could keep in touch through email while they were away
They were heading off on a cruise you see, for about two weeks. The day before my birthday. Which was also the day of my first GCSE exam.

What they hadn't considered it seemed was that I had never had access to the internet before, and fucking hell it was amazing, even then!
I guess she got nervous leaving me with such a pandora's box and decided to tell a few small fibs to keep me offline most of the time.

She told me that the internet was like a normal phone line, you have peak and off-peak times, but that the price of using it was MUCH higher. I don't remember figures but it was painful, something akin to 50p/min at weekends and £1/min the rest of the week.
Being the sort of person I am it horrified me that I should cost my parents this amount of money and so the whole time they were away, missing them like mad and feeling incredibly lonely, I only sent very few emails and they were written offline before signing in, sending, and getting straight offline again.

I believed this until well over a year later when one of my friends was talking about spending all of their evenings online and I asked them with surprise whether they had some kind of special internet package. Turns out that it actually cost the same as a local phone call, and it was off peak weekends AND weekday evenings. Hmmm.
( Jessie © needs pirate name suggestions, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 19:56, 2 replies)

In all fairness , Jessie-dear,
I had some quarterly bills from AOL when I was doing freelance journalism that amounted to £400, cos I was using it during the day- something my ex still likes to remind me about. However I usually made about £500 a month from it so what the hell.....?

C U next Sunday :-)
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 21 Aug 2008, 20:02, closed)

If you think about the sort of time this would be
(maybe 1998?) then it was about 2p/minute offpeak, maybe as much as 20p/min on.

I was a fairly responsible and considerate kid (it was barely a year before I was living by myself in a whole new town), and she knew what it cost because she
a) paid the bills and
b) was in the industry herself

I just figured it was a pretty unnecessary untruth that I swallowed hook, line and sinker for those very reasons.

Edit: see you Sunday sir! not long to go now m/
( Jessie © needs pirate name suggestions, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 20:09, closed)