Bloody Cell Phone Companies

July 1st, 2009 Filed under: Life, Rants | Tags: cell phone, telecom, vodafone

I hate cell phone companies. If I could, I would not have a cell phone at all. But I don’t have a land line number, so a cell phone is pretty much a must.

In New Zealand there are two major cell phone companies; Telecom and Vodafone. I personally use Vodafone because they have cell phones that use sim cards unlike Telecom which allows me to use the same phone I use in Taiwan, Canada etc.

Both companies offer similar plans and charges for their users, for instance they both have a best mate number which you can choose which allows you to call one number as much as you want for a month for $6, and 2000 text plan where you can send up to 2000 text messages for $10 a month. The difference is that both companies only allow you to call and text other phones on their network for the special plan, otherwise you have to pay normal charges.

As you can imagine this means that you usually choose a company based on what all your family and friends use. For instance most of my friends are on Vodafone, so I text them whenever I want, but the few friends that I do have that are on Telecom I don’t usually text because it costs me $0.20 per text on top of my $10 2000 text plan.

Up until recently it was pretty easy to tell who was on which network because all Vodafone numbers began with 021 and all Telecom numbers began with 027. I say up until recently because they have started to allow users to keep their numbers while switching networks now.

This resulted in me wasting a bunch of money, as one of my friends changed to Telecom without telling me. I continued to text them thinking it wasn’t costing me anything all the while I was slowly but surely spending a lot of extra money. Of course I didn’t find out until weeks later when I ran out of money on my phone, much to my surprise.

That is just another reason why I hate cell phone companies. Bastards.

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A New Low in Texting

May 7th, 2009 Filed under: Rants | Tags: cell phone, disgusting, sms, texting

Ever since texting hit the scene, people have taken to it like sailors took to tattoos. At first is was great, a wonderful way to communicate with your friends and colleges. Then sum people started to abuse the power of texting. They would text in sick for work to avoid faking a cough, tell friends they were too busy for a night out when really they just didn’t like them. The complete lack of face to face contact or even vocal communication made texting a perfect way to deal some pretty harsh blows without any real risk of conflict. That’s when we all started hearing about friends getting dumped via texts or people getting text bullied with an onslaught of particularly nasty messages.

Up until yesterday, those were the worst things I’d heard being done via text. But all that changed when Ivy told me about a text one of her classmates got at college yesterday. It read “Hey ***, sorry to have to tell you this, but we just can’t afford to keep you on at **** anymore. Sorry “. That’s right this poor individual just got fired by text! And if that isn’t bad enough, turns out she had been working in this job for nine years. 9 FUCKING YEARS! Can you believe that shit? Nine years and the bastards don’t even have the heart to fire her in person or the very least over the phone!

I am astounded.

What’s the worst text you ever had the pleasure of receiving?

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