well, i found a reasonable workaround.

$1/month.
$0.01/minute.
free voicemail-to-text.
no expiry.

almost free.

but now i have to wait ten or fifteen days for paypal to fail to convince me to give them a credit card number. sometimes it feels like the whole world failed economics 101. incentives? what is it, 1853?

in the long run, i'll hook a broken laptop into a router, install the scary software there and find some kind of budget ip phone on kijiji to hook up to it. for now, i'm happy with the email option.

...and i'm still thinking that i should be able to rout that to an android phone if i ever get one, too. that might make more sense than the broken laptop thing.