Yale's pricey phone system keeps us tongue-tied

By Melissa Muscat

I'm no math major, but six girls to one phone line just does not add up. Unfortunately, for the next year I'll be sharing my suite with five other typical females—typical, talkative females.

Everyone knows the hard facts about teenagers and the telephone. Young adults, especially of the female sex, have an insatiable desire to talk incessantly with all of their relatives and friends for many hours at a time, every day of the week.

But while we certainly spend a lot of time on the phone at home, our telephone fixation doesn't truly reach its peak until college. Not only do we have to converse with friends who live just a few buildings—and, in some cases, a few flight of stairs—away, but we also need to keep in touch with our no longer local friends and family members. In my suite, it's rare to find the phone to be free during the evening hours; my suitemates and I can gab to our friends for hours about the most unimportant and random of topics. And at those odd moments when it's unoccupied, it's certainly ringing. I thank the gods for call waiting; if it didn't exist, practically everyone who called my suite would get a busy signal.

The crux of the problem is that all six of us share the same line. A portion of each student's room charges is the network service fee. This covers, along with Ethernet and basic cable channels, each suite's phone line and each resident's voice mail. All students pay the same fee, but not everyone gets the same service.

Take for example the student who lives in a suite with three other people. He divides possible phone time with just those three individuals. However, someone who lives with seven other students must share the same phone time with four more people.

It's ridiculous for students to pay the same amount of money for unequal service. If phone access is not uniform, there should not be a uniform fee. Phone lines should not be distributed equally among suites; they should be distributed equally among students (a line per two people, for example). Phone access should not depend on whether an individual lucks out and shares a room with only one other person or whether the god of rooming cruelly decides that he has five other suitemates.

Circumstances being what they are, students with many suitemates have two options. They can either accept the current phone problem or, like my suitemates and I decided to do, dole out more money. Two of my suitemates have already bought cellular phones—which are a rather expensive luxury in most cases. Another suitemate and I chose the option of getting another phone line activated.

But then we ran into another obstacle. Since we both have singles, we thought it would be convenient to share a line between the two of us. We soon discovered that this kind of setup is impossible. Now the only choice we have is to each obtain separate phone lines for our rooms. Our plan to minimize costs was foiled.

My suitemate and I finally decided that private phone lines were the answer. This decision cost us an abominable $250, a fee my parents frowned on, and one that didn't even include voice mail. To have that activated, one must mete out another $18, a price I'm unwilling to pay when I can just use an answering machine.

This whole situation is simply preposterous. We should not have to shell out hundreds of extra dollars for a service that we've paid plenty for already. One would think that the enormous tuition that Yale students pay would be more than enough to cover any and all telephone costs. Unfortunately, this policy enforces an all-too-familiar lesson here at Yale—whether it's for a snail mail post office box or just a ticket to the Harvard-Yale game, everything here has its price.

Melissa Muscat is a freshman in Morse.

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