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Today I stormed the halls of corporate America.  And got my butt kicked.  Here’s my sad but all-too-common tale.

My cell phone battery has slowly deteriorated into a state of decrepitude so pronounced that even I began to notice it.  Obvious solution: buy a replacement.  But then I got some junk mail from Verizon telling me that I had a $100 credit coming my way if I upgraded my phone.  Hurrah!  Why buy a new battery if I can get a whole new phone for free?

So I went to the Verizon store and picked one out.  Not much different from my current phone, but it had a couple of handy new features.  And since it retailed for $99.95, I’d get it for free!  Except, there’s a problem:

I’m sorry, Mr. Drum, but you can’t get that phone.

Why not?

It’s only available if you’re on a nationwide plan.

But I am on a nationwide plan.  I can call anywhere in the U.S. and Canada for one low monthly charge.

Sorry.  I didn’t mean nationwide, I meant Nationwide™.

Oh.  Well, can I switch to a Nationwide™ plan?

Yes, but not like the one you currently have.  The cheapest Nationwide™ plan has more minutes than your current plan and costs $10 more per month.

So my free phone will actually cost me $240 over the life of the two-year contract?

Um, yeah.  Pretty much.

And why can’t this new phone work on my existing plan?

Well, Verizon is really trying to get everyone to switch to the Nationwide™ plan.

Great.  I actually went into the store steeling myself for the fact that my “free” phone wouldn’t actually be free.  There’d be a “transfer charge” or some alleged government waste disposal fee — or something — and I’d end up paying twenty or thirty bucks for one reason or another.  But $240?  My cynicism wasn’t up to that.

So instead I got a cheap replacement phone.  No new features, just a slightly different shape.  A wee bit smaller and lighter.  Plastic case instead of metal, so it’ll probably break before long.  But it works on my current plan, so it’s really free.

Sort of.  Actually, it cost me $50.  Why?  It took me a while to decipher what the clerk was telling me, but even though it’s a $79 phone (regular price, not any kind of special deal) and I had a $100 credit, I was required to pay $50 at the register and then send in my receipt to get a $50 mail-in rebate.  So now I have to do that.

What’s really remarkable about all this is that I suspect most people don’t even complain about it.  It’s just the way corporations treat us these days and complaining about it is useless.  It’s not as if any other cell phone company would have treated me any better, after all.  They make their money on people who buy high-minute plans and send lots of text messages and download tunes and upgrade to email and broadband.  I don’t do any of that, so they don’t really care about my business.  And why should they?

End of rant.  But since every post is required to have a political point of some kind these days, here it is for this one: there was nothing unusual about my experience.  Barely even anything to get upset about, really.  So if you wonder why I’m not bothered by the idea of government-funded healthcare, that’s why.  Frankly, my dealings with the government, on average, are better than most of my dealings with corporations.  The government might sometimes provide poor customer service just because they lack the motivation to do better, but corporate America routinely provides crappy customer service as part of a deliberate and minutely planned strategy.  I’ll take my chances with the feds.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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