You know how everybody loved that Bank of America monthly debit card fee thing? Or that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you pay Ticketmaster to let you print something out on your computer? Well, Verizon is apparently looking to get in on some of that feel-good action. According to Droid Life's sources, it appears that Verizon Wireless is looking to add a $2.00 "convenience fee" to bills paid online or over its automatic phone payment system. There are a number of still-free workarounds, including mailing an old fashioned check, or Verizon's obvious favorite: AutoPayment, but this seems a bit like a bait and switch after all the work everybody did to get away from paper billing in the first place. Also, it doesn't help that this is coming on the heels of a major LTE outage.

Of course, Verizon is right, paying a bill online or through a phone robot is convenient — for all parties involved. Verizon claims that the fee covers its ability to "continue to support these bill payment options" (you know, because all your regular bill dollars are being used entirely to improve your wireless service) but there's no way it's more costly for Verizon than processing the old fashioned, handwritten paper checks we used to pluck out of furrowed fields and send to Big Red on the Pony Express. Another free option is to pay in a Verizon store, which sounds much more expensive in terms of man hours than letting a slice of HTML take down your credit card details. Hopefully Verizon changes its mind before the change goes into effect, purportedly on January 15th.