My new job requires me to be away from my desk quite a bit which, in turn, requires me to use my mobile phone a lot more than I did previously. If my indicators are correct, this will be even more true in the future. So, I’ve been approved for a company mobile phone. This is good and bad.
It’s good because I’ll no longer have to carry the expense burden of overage minutes and, because carrying two phones is silly, will reap some personal gain by using my work phone for both purposes.
It’s bad, however, because my current personal usage pattern includes a lot of PDA usage, data access, and SMS/MMS messaging than it does talk time and because those are personal needs and not business needs, it is highly unlikely that I would be approved for a Blackberry which is the only PDA our corporate plan offers.
So, I’m stuck with four options.
- Carry two phones. Use one for work and one for personal needs. Reduce my current personal monthly plan to the lowest possible rate. Use the work phone for all calls and the personal phone for all PDA, SMS, MMS, and Email functionality.
- Carry just the work phone and deal with not having this level of connectivity and convenience that I’m used to.
- Carry just a personal phone and deal with a complex billing analysis every month to show how many minutes were used for business vs. personal use in order to justify an expense report for $10-$50 every month.
- Just suck it up and eat the personal bill.
Which option would you choose and why? Have I left off any options? Discuss!
I would try extra hard to get the Blackberry. :P
Barring that, I would consider #2, but that’s probably because I don’t really use my phone for many PDAish things. (Synced calendar and txting is nice, but I don’t think it’s worth paying a cell phone bill when that can be otherwise avoided.)
If I couldn’t survive without a fancy data plan and there is no way to get one from The Company, whether I would go with #3 or #4 depends on how big my bill would get. $10 isn’t worth the math, but $50 is.