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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Bard24601 on 2025-07-04 07:53:06+00:00.
Background: I was on a family phone plan with my folks well into my adult years. My dad liked to take the lion’s share of the data plan and would send out a passive aggressive “oink oink goes the pig” if anyone but him was using too much data. The rest of us had to connect to WiFi whenever possible. We all had better had a good reason if we got close to using up a quarter of the shared data plan (4 people on the plan and split 4 ways but he liked to take his half out of the middle). The four of us paid into the plan each month and in theory it was cheaper than an individual plan.
Story: For a birthday he announced that I was getting kicked off the family plan because I needed to “be a man” or some other grown up nonsense. I think he may have mentioned something about how he hated that my grown relatives were doing something similar and needed to grow up. The details are fuzzy but this wasn’t the first time, nor the last that be would announce unpleasant things at birthdays and holiday family gatherings so I took it in stride and switched to an independent phone plan. I got the cheapest, most basic data plan and it ended up being comparable to what I was paying into the family plan. I also realized just how little I actually use my data and the plan was actually fairly comfortable for my needs so I stuck with it.
Fallout: A year later he brings up the idea of getting me back into the family plan because getting me off the plan ended up not only costing the individual more money per person, the phone carrier also had a deal going on where the more people connected to one plan, the less expensive per person the overall plan would be. Some sort of wholesale or group discount or another. I told him that I was perfectly happy with my independent phone plan paying my own rate. I also reminded him that the only reason why I got off it to begin with was because he didn’t think I was being a responsible grown adult. I simply wanted to “prove to him” that I can manage all of my own bills like a “real” adult unlike others in my family he liked to complain about. He tried asking me a few more times about it throughout the months because it would be so much cheaper for him but I continually brought up how much he hated my relatives that “refused to grow up” and that he wanted me to not be like them per his “gift” on my birthday. I stuck with it because while I could have access to more data that I “could” use, the absence of snarky texts about being a data hog was more than worth the price.