Sometimes your purpose in life is to serve as a lesson to others. https://despair.com/products/mistakes
I learned very rapidly from my local BBS networks that some people incurred extraordinarily large long distance bills dialing out of region. Wouldn’t have learned that the easy way if someone hadn’t learned it the hard way first.
Someone at work used the phrase "he's a case study waiting to happen" about on of their colleagues a while back, and that has stayed with me.
There was often a little table at the front of the white pages which would help you work out what the rate would be for any particular long distance call. In the Midwest you could get relatively cheap rates to BBSes several states away, as long as you were up at 2am.
We couldn’t afford that and also the second phone line for my endless hours of modem, so I took local-only instead of remote-occasionally.