Mobile phones have changed the way we live and to many people have become an invaluable tool. To many others they have become a fantastic way to waste money (often their parents' money). To me, they have become a monumental pain in the fundament.
I'm not saying Mobiles are a bad thing. If I might be permitted to paraphrase Vincent Flanders, Mobiles can be used for Good or Evil or Stupid. Being a teacher, I must say most of my students seem to use them for stupid, but that is a topic for another rant. I want to rant about one of the ways to use mobiles for evil. Giant, faceless corporate evil (the worst kind!)
First let me say I'm a reluctant mobile owner. As far as I am concerned, the mobile is the last possible way to contact me. My mobile is for emergencies only, in fact the only reason I have one is that my mother insisted I get one incase my car broke down when I first got my P-Plates. So I bought a third hand Ericssen Ti-83 (yes, Ericssen, before the merger with Sony!) which dated from some time last century. It did everything a phone should - it made and recieved calls, it sent and received text messages, and as an added bonus it had eight voice dialing slots. I loved that phone.
Then I broke it, so my parents bought me a nice little LG for my birthday. It had all modcons, and I rather liked it. I didn't use the modcons, but it had them anyway.
Then I moved to the country. My LG was network locked to Vodafone, and Vodafone does not cover where I now live. So I got a Motorola V3 with Telstra Prepaid. And that my friends is when the rot set in.
Telstra is the only phone company which has coverage in Leongatha where I now live. This is a bitch as it means you HAVE to be with Telstra. Shades of the totalitarian mega-state eh? Actually, Telstra is a benevolent despot, they don't really do anything wrong and I am happy to have them as my land line phone provider. What I hate is their Prepaid setup.
Telstra prepaid works like this: You pay money, they give you credit. Okay so far, sounds like every other phone company. No get this: The more you pay, the longer it lasts. So if you want the credit to last six months, it's $50 worth of credit. $100 gets you a year. Okay, makes sense. Except when you consider Vodafone allowed you to put anything from as low as $10 in credit on your phone and it'd last all year.
Now let's have a look at my mobile usage. Like I said, basically emergencies only. So not many calls then. In fact, my mobile is turned off so often it looses track of the date and time. Seriously. So how much credit do I use a month? $10 during a busy month, maybe $20 if I'm really really going nuts. So... I spend $30 on credit, and it lasts me two months. So... most of the time this means I lose $10 every two months. This means Telstra are taking $10 from me every two months. And when my car breaks down and I reach for the phone I HAVE NO CREDIT!
Naturally this leaves me disgruntled and just fuels my dislike of the whole mobile communication thing. If I could still be on Vodafone and get the great 365 day plan (You get no frills at all, but the credit lasts a year) I would be, but I'm stuck with Telstra, and they are laughing all the way to the bank with their stupid deal. It's time the mobile companies realized that there are a lot of people like me out there who don't use their phone much, and provided a plan accordingly. And I'm not talking about those companies which only supply the cities, I'm talking about Telstra, who in many cases are the only option.
I hate monopolies.
Update: Shortly after writing this rant I went to Telstra's website to recharge my credit where I discovered that they had infact introduced a plan which allowed credit to be stored for up to a year. This plan seems to have been introduced in the last few months, and they didn't go out of their way to advertise it's existence to me. This is a step in the right direction, but it could still be better (if you recharge with less than $30 it lasts six months, you need to put more than $30 on to get the full twelve months).
The tyranny of Telstra