So you dial your buddy. As you get connected, your phone says: “Bleep-bleep-bleep. Purr-purr, purr-purr…” and so on until someone picks up. Now we all know what the purr-purr means, it is the guy’s phone ringing on the other side, but what about those three short beeps at the beginning? It is the sound of you being scammed by your cheap friend who thought he saves money by changing contracts, and can you believe it, he took his WoodenCom number over to MightyNet! Isn’t those guys just too kind and accommodating! If you believe that, you probably believe the polar bears are dying of hunger because the penguins fell off the melting icebergs and drowned.
Here is a little fact that nobody has ever shared with my in any public forum: Law requires your service provider to inform you when you are using (and thus paying) a third party network. Instead of telling you the day you sign that new contract, they opted to insert a soft “beep-beep-beep” at the beginning of your call connection. That means, when I phone your “ported” WoodenCom number I am billed by MightyNet, for they hold your current contract. Unfortunately, I also get billed by WoodenCom, because that number is registered as one of theirs on the national database for allocated phone numbers. You can move your account, but you can never move your number, because that number is part of an internationally registered network database. A MightyNet number will always and forevermore remain a MightyNet number, until MightyNet changes their name, but that number will go with them until the end of time. Or at least until we find safer, less cancer-causing communication technologies.
And that, dear friends, is why I hardly ever call you anymore. I miss you all, but you are the ones “saving money” on your new contracts, why not phone me? You only pay for one call, I have to pay for two, so I am boycotting the lying motherlovers supplying our cell services wherever I can. Also, I am changing my phone number, I am moving over to Telkom, I never hear of them pulling scams and conspiring to defraud their customers, the way Vodacom has done to me for the last time. Now you know why I am not “porting”, I will send you all my new number. I will keep the old one alive to catch messages, but I will not spend one more red cent on Vodacom. The friggin’ Guptas actually demanded the state defraud us all so MTN can pay their (well-deserved) fines in Nigeria. So no, I shall not use them either. The rest all operate second-hand via the others’ networks, mostly. Now if only Telkom will stop paying their useless, ignorant top managers such magnificent golden handshakes every time they get fired for dishonesty and/or incompetence.
But that’s an issue for the Democratic Acoitheists for Translucent Anarchy to contest, I only do retail-level bitching.
Love you all
Cilo
