Cell phone success

For obvious reasons, I cant' really use my cell phone from the office while on a snowbird soiree. As you know, the cell phone industry is a jungle of competing plans, programs, promotions, offers, counter offers and outright scams. To be safe, I wanted to get a prepaid so I wouldn't be locked into any contracts.

However, the trouble with prepaids is that I and others who have used them generally switch prepaid phone providers on a regular basis. I've used two prepaid providers in the past and can't remember either phone number assigned to those units. Therein lies one of the many problems.

Luckily, we discovered Wal-Mart's "Straight Talk" cell phone. It's almost as if this phone was invented just for us and arrived in stock at the perfect time for us. The timing of our discovery of this phone is amazing.

Basically, it cost us $72 and that includes 30 days of service including 1000 talk minutes, 1000 text messages, unlimited calls to 411 and 30 megabytes of web access.

The next thing that happened is really, truly "off the charts." We discovered Google Voice. This esoteric feature of Google giant stable of widgets is perfect for snowbirds.

We now have one single Google Voice number 208-557-9630. We can now link ANY cell phone or landline to this number! So, that means that I don't have to even bother trying to remember the Straight Talk phone's number. I simply linked it to Google Voice and now I can give out the Google Voice number. It doesn't matter one iota if we keep the Straight Talk phone or get another one or whatever. From now on, I can give out a single number and be done with it. No more confusion about changing cell phone numbers!