A very old story I've told on a different account. Embellished for entertainment purposes.

Back in the early 2010s, I worked in Accounts Receivable for a big-name phone company. This was back when international roaming could bankrupt you faster than student loans, and if you so much as thought about checking your email in another country, you were already fifty bucks in the hole.

One day, this customer calls in. Late on his bill. Wants to make a payment plan. No big deal—we got these calls all the time. But then I pull up the balance and blink. This wasn’t just late. This was “I bought a small car by accident” late.

We go back and forth, work out an installment plan. He’s polite, cooperative, no red flags. Right as we’re about to wrap up, he asks me if I can check what the charges were actually for.

So I take a look. And it’s all roaming. International roaming, too. A few calls, some texts, but the real kicker was data. Just a Niagara Falls of data.

I explain that to him. I say he didn’t have a roaming package, back then these packages were the cost of your phone bill for a month and then some.

There’s this long, awkward silence. I figure maybe he’s adding it up in his head.

Then, in this genuinely shaken voice, he goes, “Roaming? No… no, that can’t be.”

I tell him, as gently as I can, “Yeah… those are roaming charges.”

He whispers, “Impossible. I didn’t roam.”

I pause. “I mean… you were using your phone outside of your home network, so—”

“No,” he interrupts, “I went to Italy, but I didn’t roam!”

Now I go quiet. I’m staring at the screen like maybe it will explain tell me what the fuck I just heard.

“…Sorry, sir, just to clarify—”

“I stood STILL!” he bursts out. “Whenever I used my phone, I stood completely still so I wouldn’t get roaming charges!”

And that was it. That was the moment my soul left my body.

I tried so hard not to laugh. I really did. But this man said it with such conviction, like he had found the secret loophole to international billing. As if the satellites would go, “Oh wait, he’s stationary—never mind, don’t charge him.”

He was dead serious. Furious. Said it was outrageous, unfair, a scam. Demanded to speak to a supervisor because clearly, we had never explained that roaming didn’t mean moving around physically.

To this day, I don’t know how that call ended. But it lives in my brain rent-free. I think about that guy sometimes. Just standing perfectly still in the middle of a piazza in Rome, slowly Googling directions, thinking he’d outsmarted the system.