© Gaetan Lee

When I quit Verizon, the customer-retention person offered me a 550-minute plan for $10 less a month, or $60 instead of $70 (for two lines). Armed with this information, [my friend] called and asked for the 550-minute Family Plan. Customer rep had no idea what he was talking about. The plan didn't exist.

Then this week, he called back and got more aggressive, threatening to defect to another wireless service. Actually, it wasn't that aggressive: He asked how much it would cost to cancel his current contract.

Suddenly, he's offered a 550-minute Family SharePlan.

He had reasons he wanted to stay with Verizon, so he took the deal and saved $120 per year for the effort of making a phone call and veiled threat.

If I can live without it for a month, I can live without it for years. Until I've reached the point where I need constant Internet access (seriously hoping never), I'll be keeping the data service off my mobile phone plan.

I have wondered must how much paper it takes to make so many phone books, how much gas it takes to delivery them and just how much it really costs by the time I pick them up, throw them into the recycle bin for them to be on their way back from whence they came.

I did a little research ... 615 million phone books are distributed in the U.S. each year, weighing 660,000 tons! Fewer than 40% make it back to recycling. Who knows how many phone books are delivered and immediately pitched into the trash.

If you spend an hour of your life earning $20, then you spend that $20 on a CD, it's gone. Your life is gone. If you spend two hours getting a listing ready on eBay and you make a profit of $1.34 selling a CD, that time is gone, too. Was it worth that $1.34? Was the initial purchase of the CD worth $20?

We told him we really enjoyed our stay and were considering buying a time share. He smiled and asked about the details of the deal for the time share. I told him that for $40,000, we'd get 7 or 8 nights at one of the resorts but we were unclear as to the value of the rooms we would be getting. He looked up as he drifted off into deep thought and came back with, "if you took $40,000 and invested it to get an 8% return, you'd earn $3,200 in interest every year and you could stay at a hotel for $450/night for 7 nights."