It's No Surprise, They're Giving None Away
I'm sick. I can't afford a new phone, I just can't. There's nothing affordable out there that I can accept in any way--for fifty bucks or so I can get a phone worse than the one I gave up a few months ago (no vibrate function, which might be all right if I were a quadriplegic), and after that they immediately scale up to closer to $150. Nextel is entitled to my money whether I have a phone or not, as the destruction was my own fault. That's $40 a month I lose if I don't plow a lot more money into this as soon as possible, so it's goodbye to some of the nice purchases I'd been tentatively planning for the coming months. (Oh, and to the nice features I'd gotten used to on this phone.)
My consolation is the fact that I don't own a car, which would have me very, very used to the idea of spending a fortune to maintain something that I'm not going to remain attached to for long.
This is one of the places where cellphone companies make their big profit - on the users who are stuck in contracts but lose or break the phones. The last time I lost a phone, it turned out to be cheaper to pay to get out of my contract with AT&T and start new service with T-Mobile, because the benefits of starting new with them were so good. Now, I just pray that I don't lose the fucking phone.