Evenings & Weekends

The most miserable scum crawling across the face of the earth today just have to be mobile phone companies. This might seem like the reaction of someone who just had a really bad experience with one but I can assure you that they haven't done anything specific to me recently, so this isn't a "How dare you fuck with me" rant; it's the result of a calm reasoned analysis which concludes that the people responsible for developing mobile phone plans should be gathered together and executed.

The whole industry is built on the idea that you should estimate how many minutes you will talk each month and then buy that many minutes. If you don't use them you waste all the money you spent on them but if you use more the phone company will (almost literally) fuck you up the arse with "overage" charges. The whole idea is patently ridiculous - no matter how many minutes you estimate you can be 100% certain that you will NOT talk for that many minutes. It will either be more or less, guaranteed. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Just imagine buying gasoline that way. You have to decide how many miles you will drive each month and pay a gas station to have that many gallons of gas available for you. It costs you $3/gallon (apologies to European readers, for whom $3/gallon would be a sodding miracle) so you write a check for the cost of that many gallons and send it in. If you don't drive that many miles, tough shit - you can't get your money back. But should you need to drive more miles for any reason you will pay $10/gallon for any extra gas you use that month. Oh, and you are locked into that many gallons for two years. Sounds fair and reasonable, doesn't it? Like fuck.

I had to laugh when they started advertising "rollover" minutes, like this was an amazing innovation they'd come up with just to make your life better. The idea that you could keep the minutes you'd bought and use them over a longer period - how kind of them. But rollover minutes are the answer to a problem that they created. The only reason you had the problem in the first place is because of the arse-fuckingly unfair pricing regimes that the mobile phone companies invented and stuffed down everyone's throats. Those commercials were a bit like someone kicking you in the balls and then telling you that they had some great news - they could sell you some ointment to make them hurt less.

So now Verizon is offering yet another "innovation"; unlimited minutes for a flat fee. Here's what a Verizon lackey said about this new idea:

"The new flat rate voice plans truly free customers from the worry of counting minutes,"

So they're all concerned about us and want to help us over our worries? Bollocks. Big, pink, hairy, dangly bollocks. Complete wall-to-wall, all-in-one, oven-roasted, crispy fried bollocks. They are the bastards who invented "having to worry about your minutes" becuase they are the people who invented the "stick it right up your arse" overage charges that hit you when you use too many. If they charged you the same price for every minute then you wouldn't worry about using more, would you? Not surprisingly, peace of mind doesn't come cheap - it will cost you $100 a month, so better get lubed up for another mobile phone arse-reaming.

Leaving aside the pricing issue, does anyone actually have the time and patience to wade through all the myriad phone plan combinations? And all the hardware options that go along with them? Do you really know the difference between a MOTORAZR2 and a MOTORAZR2 Luxury, or an LG KG800 Chocolate and a VX8550 Chocolate? By the time you've figured that out you don't have any time left to call anyone.

So in special recognition of all the phone company marketing wankers and their contribution to society, here's how they should be punished. They should be assigned a number of lashes between 200 and 1000 but they have to guess how many. (They'll either guess high or low.) After receiving the full number of lashes they will also receive one kick in the private parts for every lash by which they underestimated their assigned number, or one fork up the arsehole for every lash by which they overestimated the number. Plus one hundred "Anytime" slaps in the face, and a thousand "Evenings and Weekends" nipple tweaks. Sounds fair to me...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison