well, i found a reasonable workaround.

$1/month.
$0.01/minute.
free voicemail-to-text.
no expiry.

almost free.

but now i have to wait ten or fifteen days for paypal to fail to convince me to give them a credit card number. sometimes it feels like the whole world failed economics 101. incentives? what is it, 1853?

in the long run, i'll hook a broken laptop into a router, install the scary software there and find some kind of budget ip phone on kijiji to hook up to it. for now, i'm happy with the email option.

...and i'm still thinking that i should be able to rout that to an android phone if i ever get one, too. that might make more sense than the broken laptop thing.

you know, all i really want is a local phone number (it has to be local because the primary reason i need the phone in the first place is for the border fascists....this is apparently an impossible process without a phone number....) that routs to a voice mail box and routs those messages to email. that way, i could walk down to a pay phone and call somebody back, if necessary. or respond via email. that's what i always did in the past; somebody would leave me a message, and i'd send them an email.

the system could be fully automated. there's no real justification to pay for it.

google voice can do that, but not in canada. which sort of makes me want to launch a string of terrorist attacks against the communications oligopoly. i know that won't solve anything. but, fuck them. there's ways around it, but not with a local area code. i can't give the border fascists a wyoming area number, they'll think i'm running coke back and forth. so i'm stuck with the whole voip rigmarole, which i'm dreading going through with.

in the end, i'll probably just buy the voip mailbox and never actually go through the process of getting an ip phone or installing the software. then i'll forget to buy minutes and lose my number...

how does it make sense to ask for verification by phone when somebody is signing up for a phone number?

ugh.