[inversetelecine]

Accidently dialing an non-local number for AOL ended up getting me banned from the family PC for a month. Long distance charges were expensive. (US)

Then we were in Germany in the late 90s and even local calls cost money so one had to be wary of how many hours you were online. Eventually we got flat-rate and ISDN 64k and then 128k but it wasn't long after that we moved back to the US.

[jandrese]

I discovered that my phone company had numbers in the same area code that were "medium distance". You dialed them like a local call and they were in the same area code, but they would inflate your phone bill in a hurry. It wasn't easy to figure out if a number would be in that zone either. I had to cancel my first ISP after getting the monster phone bill at the end of the month. Luckily they weren't full up long distance or it would have bankrupted me, also lucky that I only joined the ISP in the middle of the month.