I don't know why I didn't think to try this before.
Here is the situation. It is Saturday and there is a major hardware upgrade @ work of which I play a small part. This required me to call into a conference call to coordinate my piece of the pie with the other techs on this job. Now, my job take A LOT of conference calls. We are very spread out and there is a lot of remote work involved. This is very nice when you don't want to go in to the office and would rather spend a day working in your pajamas in your home office. The only down side is that your family may have to deal with you when you decide to forgo the morning shower since you are not leaving the house but that is probably TMI. I digress.
When I took this job and started working from home I upgraded the plan on my cell phone to include more minutes so that I could cover the time I would sit on conference calls @ home. I've been doing that for a while. Tonight I decided to see what it would be like to use Skype to call in to the bridgeline (That is what we call the conference call number). I was going to add a little bit of credit to my Skype account and try it tonight until I read a passage on the Skype website that said your first call was free. OK, so they are using the drug dealer model. I'll bite. Even though I have been using Skype for a while I had yet to attempt to dial a "real" phone number. I decided to see if my account still held this initial free credit. I dialed the number and it worked! WooHoo! Then after a little over an hour I lost my connection for some reason. Dangit! I figured I had burned my first, free credit and now I was going to have to pay for the next taste. I was entirely willing to do so but for some reason I dialed again. I guess I was thinking it would prompt me to pay for credit for the call. To my surprise the call went through again! I was happily surprised and then I started thinking "Wait a minute. The number that I am dialing is an 866 number. That is a free number like 1-800. Hey, maybe Skype allows you to dial toll free numbers without credit!" Since that thought I have dropped off again and made another successful, free call. The drop off is another issue I may have to address but for now it looks to me like I can use my Mac when I am home to dial into conference calls through Skype which can run from 30 minutes to 2+ hours. Talk about saving a ton of minutes on my cell phone! I may even be able to ramp my plan back to less minutes and save some money each month. SCORE!
Moral of the story is, if you can, use Skype on your computer to call 800 or 866 numbers instead of burning precious cell phone minutes. This can be especially helpful for those technical support calls that keep you on hold for an hour.