I just got my DarTalk bill. Oh, how I love DarTalk. The first thing I noticed was that they charged me $11 for service fees. I'm a UGA, so I don't have to pay those fees. I called my dear DarTalk friends, and they informed me that they didn't know that I was a UGA, so they had to charge me this month. They assured me that I would get the money refunded in October. I almost would have believed this if I hadn't written UGA in huge letters across my new account form.
I'm not a big fan of DarTalk, so I didn't get my own account until January last year. In February I realized that it was dumb not to share an account with my roommate, so I canceled mine. Date of cancellation: February 28. Date that the money left in the account was refunded to me: May 2. Sound ridiculous? It did to me. I called DarTalk quite a few times during the two month period. Each time they told me that the refund process takes time. How can anyone possibly say that putting a refund check for $12.82 into somebody's Hinman Box is a two-month process? I had to wait two months for my refund, but all of us whose accounts go two cents negative have service immediately suspended. My roommate got really annoyed, and suggested that she cancel her account in protest. But if she had done that, we wouldn't have been able to receive any long distance calls. DarTalk leaves students with no choice but to have at least one account per room if we ever want people to call us.
The packet I received before my freshmen year told me that phone service costs $15 a month, and that we receive 10% off AT&T's basic rate. It sounded good for about two seconds, until my dad looked at it and reminded me that the basic rate is the highest possible phone rate, and that no sane person ever pays it. As a result, even after the 10% discount, we still pay about 14 cents a minute for our nighttime phone use. If you don't think that $.14 a minute sounds too bad, consider this. My parents pay $.10 a minute 24 hours a day. My friends at other colleges all pay that or less, and at other colleges they don't have to pay the $15 each month. I decided to figure out exactly how much this costs us.
Let's say you have a HTH, or other person that you call frequently. Let's say you spend three hours a week talking on the phone, or about twelve hours a month. At $.14 a minute, you will spend $28 more this month than your friends who pay $.10 a minute. Plus, you have to pay $15 a month just to have phone service. You are wasting $43 this month. So let's say that the typical year consists of nine months, and a Dartmouth career is 36 months. At the end, you will have spent $1,548 more than you should have. If there was no DarTalk, you could have used that money to pay off some loans or take a vacation to DisneyWorld. Even if you don't talk on the phone that much, you are still spending a lot of excess money, which most likely comes out of your own pocket, and isn't funded by financial aid. We already pay $30,000 a year, why can't Dartmouth let AT&T handle our phone service and try to save us some money for a change?
