Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

So I’ve been having problems lately with my Bell Mobility phone, specifically calling my wife. Instead of the usual horrible-quality connection I now can’t even connect to international numbers. I can still call within Canada and get a good, clean line though.

So I called Bell and got through to a customer service rep. I explained the problem, and the CSR told me my handset was probably broken. He stumbled a bit when I told him I was using the very phone in question to speak to him - but only a bit… He then attempted to tell me that I qualify for a “hardware upgrade”. I can go into a Bell store and get a new phone, and instead of signing the usual 3 year contract they’ll only stick me with 2 years.

I told him let’s cut the bullshit - between you and me, good sir, we know the phone works well. “I’m talking to you, and my wife calls me using her mobile phone to this phone with no problems. So my phone is probably not the issue.”

The good fellow then explained to me - I kid you not - that Japan is very high tech, and she gets a good connection due to “GPS satellites and triangles”. He knows this because he has a friend there. There was no use of the word triangulation, which might lend some twisted sense to this bullshit - it was all about the triangles. And this was ignoring the fact that the wife can call me with no problems, and that yesterday I could actually connect to her.

I just kind of sat there, stunned (which I’m getting good at). I asked if this was the official answer to why I can’t call overseas anymore and hear the other person. He wavered and finally answered no, and actually opened a support ticket for me - yet admitted that probably nothing would come from it.

Now that’s a case of a customer service agent just bullshitting, making things up as he goes along. This happens often, lots of people do it (I’ve probably done it at least ten times in the last few hours). The other fun phone company experience I had today was with the newly-launched Virgin Mobile. They use CDMA phones - that’s a con on my list - but I’m willing to try anything.

So I call Virgin Mobile at work today and ask what the international calling rate to Japan is. They answer $2.05 Canadian. Again, stunned silence comes from me as I just try to process this. Rogers charges what I previously considered an expensive 65 cents a minute, and these fuckers charge 3 times that.

I asked the Virgin representative why, and he read to me (I think) that “Virgin actually only charges 25 cents, but the Japanese system charges the remaining $1.80.” I say read, because I don’t think that this guy was making this up - it sounded like he was reading this answer from his screen. Which is fucked up, because it’s a lie - an obvious, blatant lie. Neither Rogers nor Bell Mobility pay $1.80 to “Japan” per minute for calls. I’m sure there’s a fee charged for when a call is connected to the Japanese system, but I doubt either of them is losing so much money on international calls.

The third fuckup was with Rogers. I called to get their quote on charges to Japan (the 65 cents as mentioned before). The woman on the phone told me that I can in the future find this information on Rogers’ website. I asserted that I could not find that information on the site, since I had previously spent some time searching for that very number. She insisted it was on the website.

I searched again - still can’t find it. I may be stupid, or overlooking it on the Rogers site. These are possibilities I can deal with. But it’s strange that not a one of these 3 companies I’ve mentioned show the international calling rates on their websites. If someone knows the secret link, or can point me in the right direction I’d be happy. Call me cynical, but I conclude that - shock! - they don’t want you to compare their rates to the rates of their competitors.

Anyways, that’s enough ranting for now.

Update: Like I said, I can overlook things. And sure enough Derek E. sends me the links to the Rogers and Bell Mobility rates online.

Unwanted popups in Firefox are usually caused by small embedded Flash movies. If you want to disable them, do this:

• Type “about:config” without the quotes into the addressbar and press Go.
• Right click on any entry and choose “New”, then “Integer”
• Enter “privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins” for the name of the new preference, and set it’s value to “2″.

I whipped up a Delicious clone in Perl since I’m tired of the service always being down (plus I wanted private bookmarks). It’s available for download here. You can look at my bookmarks to see an example.