Yesterday, I inexplicably found myself at Streetsville station with a dead phone. Needing to make a call, I walked over to the Bell payphone in the corner of the station shelter and inserted 25 cents. The payphone beeped happily, and told me to insert another 25 cents. What is that. Seriously. Since when did Bell up the charge from 25 cents to 50 cents? Geez seriously... seeing as how they are totally losing out in Canada's market for home and cell phones, you might expect them to lower the charge for using a payphone to, say... 20 cents? Or 15 cents? But no, they just had to up the fee to half a dollar, sheesh.
So after inserting another quarter, the phone prompted me to make a call. After calling one number and getting a busy town, the phone prompted me to "Press button for next call". So I did. I called another number, and after getting the voice mail, it prompted me to "Press button for next call", again, So I did, And what did it say to me? "Insert 50 cents"?! Bullcrap. Seriously, I was getting seriously pissed by this time not being able to make any calls, and this phone eating my 50 cent.
After this, I dialed 0 for operator, intending to give the Bell person on the other end a piece of my mind. After reaching her, I told her that the payphone had eaten my 50 cents. She replied by saying "Ok, I'll give you your money back, but you have to hang up." At first, I thought "What is this crap?" So I asked her how this would work, but she didn't really give me an answer. So I hung up. At first I thought she would send a remote signal to the phone to get it to spit out my 50 cents, but after waiting 5 minutes, I realized that maybe that's not what she meant. Perhaps she meant for me to pick up the phone and realizing that she had electronically "inserted" another 50 cents for me to use to make a call. But before I could figure that out, my ride arrived.
This whole incident left me wondering a few things:
So after inserting another quarter, the phone prompted me to make a call. After calling one number and getting a busy town, the phone prompted me to "Press button for next call". So I did. I called another number, and after getting the voice mail, it prompted me to "Press button for next call", again, So I did, And what did it say to me? "Insert 50 cents"?! Bullcrap. Seriously, I was getting seriously pissed by this time not being able to make any calls, and this phone eating my 50 cent.
After this, I dialed 0 for operator, intending to give the Bell person on the other end a piece of my mind. After reaching her, I told her that the payphone had eaten my 50 cents. She replied by saying "Ok, I'll give you your money back, but you have to hang up." At first, I thought "What is this crap?" So I asked her how this would work, but she didn't really give me an answer. So I hung up. At first I thought she would send a remote signal to the phone to get it to spit out my 50 cents, but after waiting 5 minutes, I realized that maybe that's not what she meant. Perhaps she meant for me to pick up the phone and realizing that she had electronically "inserted" another 50 cents for me to use to make a call. But before I could figure that out, my ride arrived.
This whole incident left me wondering a few things:
Why couldn't she just have patched me through from her location?
- Why did the phone not show me that it had a 50 cent credit in it?
- Why in the world did they raise the fee from 25 cents to 50 cents?
- Why do they make you pay 50 cents for one call, instead of allowing you to make as many calls as you can in one minute?
- When did Bell start to suck?
Anyways, I think I'll just stick to having my phone charged all the time.
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I've added a new link to the sidebar to my friend ctyctycty's blog, That's So In: http://www.ctyctycty.blogspot.com/. It's a pretty interesting new blog about my friend's ideas on fashion... and other stuff. Maybe.
kamster
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