I walked into a Rogers Wireless store the other day as a customer, and was blown away by the honesty of one sales clerk. To do that, he said one word: “Revenue.”

Let me back up. I had just returned from a holiday in Brazil, where I had brought my Blackberry so I could stay in contact with family and friends in a cheaper fashion than with a cellphone or with a hotel's exorbitant telephone service charges. Which is why I didn't shut down my e-mail accounts before I went.

When I came back, I got a bill from Rogers, covering the data charges I incurred over about half of the time I spent in Rio (I'll get a bill for the other half later).

The damages: 5,151 kilobytes — about 5 megabytes — for a total of $241.11. I expect it to double when the next bill comes, adding up to about two days in a four-star hotel room with an all-you-can-eat breakfast of pastries and tropical fruits. This is the real measure of how Canadians pay the highest data rates in the world: Just under $50 per megabyte.

I've learned my lesson: Don't incur roaming charges. Don't stay in touch. Forget productivity. Forget the convenience promised by modern technology. Don't even think of working while abroad. Just suffer, and let your company, family and friends suffer. Rogers' shareholder demands trump anything you might want to use your cellphone for.

It was my fault, of course. I knew Canadians pay the world's highest data rates, but I had no idea how much I was incurring while on the road.

So I went to a Rogers store and asked the sales clerk how I could have calculated the charges as they occurred. I expected there to be some website that could tell me what I routinely learn from taxi cabs: a real-time fare update. So where do I look?

I can't do it, I was told by the sales clerk. It's not possible.

Why not?

“Because Rogers tells all of its cellphone manufacturers to disable that feature in our cellphones,” he said in a manner that suggested I was the last person to learn this. Perhaps I was.

And why does Rogers do that?

That's when he dropped the one-word bomb: “Revenue.”

Talk about honesty.

So Rogers won't keep a running tally of my roaming data charges because it consciously made a decision not to tell me; if I knew, I might cut back on my use of e-mail or using that neat WorldMate Live application that tells me if my flight is on time, what I can expect in terms of weather and what the currency exchange rate is.

I was hit with this bill coincidentally with Rogers's news that it would be releasing the Apple iPhone some time later this year, which is relevant because the iPhone is a notoriously heavy user of data traffic. Catherine McLean's story in the Globe and Mail pointedly mentioned that Rogers was looking at the iPhone as its “next moneymaker” and that users will probably have to pay a minimum of $80 a month for the iPhone instead of the $72.39 average for other cellphones. And that's just in Canada — if you're a real glutton for punishment or have money to burn, get an iPhone and schlep it with you when you travel.

Unless of course you don't care because your company is picking up your roaming tab and not complaining about it. And that brings up yet another question: If corporations are really interested in efficiencies as they say they are, why aren't they complaining?

“Speculation about the delay [in releasing the iPhone] includes the possibility that Rogers may be less than keen on changing its data rate plans as other carriers have done,” Catherine Mclean wrote. She went on to note that Rogers “reported that monthly bills for cellphone subscribers on contracts jumped $4.75 to $72.39 due to greater data service demand.”

Well, I'm really happy for Rogers' shareholders. But I can't say I'm a very happy customer.