Peaches and Dulcinea: Skip this

I must have been reading a news article,(this news article looks good,) when my foggy mind hearkened back to the olden days.

Or something (It's a day later and I can't remember why this came up)

Although I can guess it had something to do with government funding and legislation for rural internet, which everyone wants but few specify what the money will go towards.

A new satellite?

Cell phone towers?

something with "WiFi" in the name?

Teeny towns wanting money love words like infrastructure, but I'd need to back up the images in my mind of amber weeds growing by the sides of fenced roads with actual articles, and it must have been much easier to write the below.

A guy calls his Girlfriend, talks late into the night, gets charged $700, stuff you're too young to remember.

"Local-long distance area Calling" is for the truly old to remember...actually I'm not *that* old and I don't remember all the names.

But

calling within your own area code could still be charged extra, you just didn't have to dial any extra numbers.

"Toll" / "Long distance" prolly mean two different things but it was a matter of price.

Calling your friend at the beach vs calling san Francisco vs calling London vs calling the Pizza-place...

It got very complicated.

So they had discount plans you paid for in advance, to get a discount on (maybe) the pizza-place, just a block outside your free-unlimited area.

So.....the vestige of all that, is,

they'll charge you ~~more~~ high flat rates for "Unlimited long distance" as if it were still a thing people remembered (they don't, not really) but they still charge more (or try to let you know they don't) for "International dialing", another very complicated mess.

If you miss the old days, I still think you can rack-up extra charges by dialing "Station-to-station"

which was cool cuz you heard about calling boats or planes, and having nothing much to say for $5.00 a minute (It tends to stifle your conversation knowing every 30 seconds you could've bought a hamburger)

But no, hamburgers are way more than $5, phones are stuck on plans you're granddad paid less in a year than you pay a month.

It's like, stuff is more, they itemize less (or something) this train broke down, please board another train, and thank you for reading P&D. "Have a nice day"

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People get paid more than your phone plan charges in a year to write crap like the below:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/remember-when-you-could-call-the-time/488273/ calling canada (the UK?) to get a recording in french/english "Veuillez vérifier le numéro et composer à nouveau" was a real gas, man