After about 7 weeks on the road (Jordan, Israel, Italy, Austria and Germany), my wife and I finally made it back to Canada.
It’s taken only a couple days for the Cell Phone companies here to frustrate me beyond belief. Having gotten used to paying the equivalent of CAD$12/month for a cell phone plan in Singapore, I’m back to North America, where I’m looking at about CAD$46/month (including taxes, a gouging for voice mail and call display, a special $6.95 ‘System Access Fee’, and Other Random Chargesâ„¢) for about the same amount of service.
If that weren’t enough, we got our phones home, and they don’t even work. If anyone tries to dial my number, they get a busy signal or a message saying “Sorry, all circuits are busy”. Rogers was good enough to say they would try to get back to me with a resolution within “48 business hours” (are you fricking kidding me?) – and customer service said that I could “call us back when your phones are working, and we can credit your account with the number of days you missed”. The customer service lady wondered why I thought that was unacceptable, seeking some sort of reasonable compensation for such a screw up. She politely played her broken record entitled “Sorry, that’s all I can do” for me – over and over and over until I got so fed up that I told her I’d call back later and talk to a manager.
Welcome home.
On the plus side, I have a new article to write for IBM developerWorks, and it looks like a pile of projects that are looking like they’ll actually materialize sometime in the next couple weeks. Yay.