As I have been entering the phone records into a usable format for analysis it dawned on me that we need to look at these records only as a partial record at best. This might be more evident to us older people. (!)
Back 2004 and specifically with the cellular plan that Maura was part of the world of phone use was significantly different. I know this not only from my own experience as an early cell phone user but in fact I worked in a call center as a customer service agent for Sprint PCS up until 2004. I probably should have mentioned that this very job experience was why I reached out to Sprint recently to clarify the plan and request a copy of the TOS from that time period.
Regardless, I am still waiting for a response because although I already know the answers to the questions I asked in the Sprint Request, I don't want you to take my word for it, I want you to see the primary source information.
The point I wish to discuss is that back then minutes were money and going over was a huge risk. I believe for credit-based plans like the one Maura was a part of, overage minutes were charged at the rate of $0.35/min. The reason I mention this information is that people were paranoid about using minutes because they could go over and it got really expensive. I remember one customer had used $1500 dollars in one month of overage minutes.
So here is how the minutes worked on this plan:
There were 2000 Anytime Minutes which were basically day use minutes and if you ran out you paid the overage rate. There were unlimited night and weekend minutes which were after 9pm to 7am, so no overage risk. Then there were unlimited minutes for PCS - PCS calls which on the bill are represented by the phone icons.
One way that many people minimized their anytime minutes usage was to check their voicemail from a landline. Because landlines were still very prevalent this was an easy work around. Some folks even wanted to have a private voicemail box so they bought the minimum plan and just interacted with the system that way. When I was in high school that is what I did. I got a phone in 1998 and I just bought the basic plan so that I could have a private answering machine basically so my parents wouldn't answer calls from people I didn't want them to!
Which brings me to my actual point here. These records are handy, but considering Maura knew Billy could see the records and was probably paranoid about using too many minutes, they aren't even close to what could have been going on with her communication wise.
For example, say she had a side piece. He just calls, leaves a message on her password protected VM and she returns the call on another line. It will be interesting to see how many calls Billy made to Maura though, because if I read him right I bet he tried to get into that voicemail. We shall see.
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