Up early because I got a text message at 5am this morning saying "Your data charges are very high. To minimize a costly bill & service interruption, please call AT&T 800-331-0500 or 611 from your wireless. AT&T Free Msg"

Thanks for the free message, AT&T. So I called customer support when they opened at 7am this morning, and I think I got someone who was either being interviewed or instructing the other support personnel on how to handle a caller or something because she started the call with a chipper "Thank you for calling AT&T this is Kelly and I will try to do my very best this morning to help you with anything I can!" And she was surprisingly helpful, though I don't think she was expecting my kind of problems this early in the morning.

Turns out AT&T wants to charge me $800 for two youtube videos I streamed yesterday, when I thought it was going through my wireless LAN. (It was reviews of StreetFighter 4 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, btw.) Or they want to strong arm me into signing up for a data plan.

She had a hard time following how the fact that I had remote desktop connected to my desktop through its local IP address earlier (and that the apparently worthless settings on windows mobile say that my data connection is disabled) made me think that this youtube application was streaming through my LAN. I told her I didn't want the data plan, so she backdated a cancel order on my data connection, and she thinks that will automatically cancel the charge. She said that if not, "they" are going to make me sign up for a dataplan which they can then definitely backdate. We'll see. I'm supposed to check back in a month.

Kate: I KNEW you were going to put that quote in your blog!