How much is your sanity worth?

By and large, I am very skeptical when any major corporation wants to "give" me something or do something that appears in my best interest.

Want to sign me up for a rewards program? Who will you be selling my e-mail address, phone number and home address to?

Would I like to be a preferred customer and receive 15 cents off a can of soup? What kind of consumer profile are you attempting to create by dissecting my shopping habits?

Usually, it's a combination of my own paranoia and looking too far into things that eventually result in the big "gotcha" moment - though I suppose that's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy to an extent. It's something I've come to terms with.

Still, when I was getting the pieces in place to switch cell phone companies this week from AT&T/Cingular to Sprint, I saw the light. Rollover minutes are a devious plan to trap cheap punks like me who can barely stomach the idea of throwing away theoretical money once it has started to pile up in our accounts.

I'd been a customer with AT&T first and weathered the storm when they were bought by Cingular. With that switch, the Cingular folks introduced rollover minutes and I watched them pile up for over a year now.

AT&T didn't offer this option and I rarely used my monthly allotment of minutes - primarily because it's expensive to go over, especially on a monthly plan. With that month-to-month deal, I was charged as I went, with the account reloading once a month.

When I was on the road, I could tear through minutes like there was no tomorrow and watch them repopulate when I was home and could turn the phone off. Still, for a benefit that I didn't have when I opened the original account, I grew very protective of my tiny savings account of talk time - especially because it held a set dollar amount for me on my phone.

My new plan is the same price, but instead of 250 minutes, period, I now get 500 weekday minutes, free nights and weekends and unlimited data. For another 100 bones, I have a Palm Centro that streams everything but nuclear launch codes to my pocket when I'm out on tour.

Yet, it stung just a little to let those $150 in minutes slip away when I cut AT&T loose.

I have a better plan, I'm a lot happier with my phone and Cingular made no attempt to try and keep me as a customer after a handful of phone calls to check account status as I prepped the number to be ported to Sprint, so in the big picture, it's all upside for me.

Just a word of warning to all the cheap people out there - use up those rollover minutes or be ready to feel a small sense of loss when you switch cell phone companies. It kind of feels like being shot with a small caliber bullet.

(Image from: SarangShah.com)