I’m not sure if it’s just me, but there seems to be something going on with Verizon’s airtime minutes counter. Last month I went online to check my plan balance: I normally do this once or twice a week. When I check, I still had about five days left to my billing cycle, but I was perilously close to running out of minutes (I only had about thirty left). I made sure not to make anything but brief calls during the ensuing week. However, once the billing cycle ended my statement showed that I actually had about 100 minutes left. I figured that it was just something wrong with the software program, and vowed to make sure to double check my balance in the future. Fast forward to this past month when I again checked my balance online and I discovered on the 20th that I only had about fifteen daytime minutes left. This time however instead of just checking online, I also used the minute counter through my phone (there’s a number you can call to check your balance) for confirmation. Sure enough it gave the exact same balance as on the online site. Then I looked at my most recent billing statement and low and below I finished the cycle out with almost sixty minutes. Had it just happened once, I would have figured that there is a software glitch, but it’s now happened two months in a row. It seems that either calls are getting incorrectly categorized as peak when I make them, or they are adjusting them downward after the fact. Part of the problem is you can’t see how calls are categorized until the end of the billing cycle. My plan this month is to try and keep track of my peak minutes by hand (which I am not particularly looking forward to). If I’m still noticing discrepancies I think that I might have to give Verizon’s customer service a call. I don’t want to get billed 45 cents a minute in overage charges, but I don’t like the idea of losing a large chunk of minutes every month either.