I've had nearly a month in Hawaii now. That's a month of space in a place where there's surprisingly little to do. (Actually, there are quite a few things to do but many of them cost a small fortune - and frankly, the food prices are crippling my budget without any assistance from Fun Stuff.)
It means I've had a chance to do even more thinking than usual - possibly a dangerous thing - and catch up with a few people I hadn't been in touch with for a while (albeit while accommodating irritating time zones). And through it all, I've come up with a bunch of random comments that I wanted to throw out to the world in general. Apply it to your own life or not as you see fit, they're not directed at specific individuals. Note: I'll refer to 'guys' and 'girls' in a particular way because hell, I'm a straight female. I can't be bothered to do the PC thing and write every variation on a theme. Just stick in the gender that applies to your situation.
- if you don't have the possibility of being around a dog and interacting with it for significant portions of Every Single Day, don't own one. It's a simple rule. You might be able to stick a kid in front of an XBox for an entire afternoon, but not a dog.
- if you choose to stick your kid in front of an XBox for an entire afternoon, don't be surprised when I'm not nuts about your parenting skills. As a non-parent, I'm apparently not entitled to have any opinions on parenting because 'you haven't been there, man'. By that token, unless you have a PhD on the subject you're talking about, shut up because you clearly don't know enough about it to warrant an opinion.
- if your child is a nice person, I'll probably like them. If they aren't - if they're manipulative or rude or unkind or just plain boring - I probably won't. I think it's criminal when parents bring up their kids to NOT be nice people. That's your job. Not the job of teachers, yours. In my mind, a child is a person: I'm allowed to choose whether or not I like people. Why is this so gosh darn horrendous when I extend the same 'limitation' to a child?
- if you think you've been abandoned, maybe you abandoned them. Maybe they think they were available one too many times, maybe generous one too many times. Maybe they feel used and fed up and frustrated, and just tired of the fact you never, ever ask how they're doing.
- if your guy is making you unhappy, leave. No 'ifs and buts', just leave. You should never, ever have to ask someone to change for you; they should want to make the changes anyway because you are important enough to them. No amount of the second part of this statement, 'I won't change - but oh my goodness, you are beautiful and wonderful and make my life complete' can make up for the first part. I've played both sides of that game. If someone won't change, they just aren't that into you. Period.
- if you think 'so and so's life is easy', well, you're probably wrong. This applies to everyone you meet in life: in some way or another, everyone is fighting a battle. Stop being bitter because their life seems to be 'easier' than yours. It's just different. All of us have battles we are hiding from the world.
- if you promise somebody something, stick to that promise. Don't lie. Don't put yourself in a position whereby you 'have' to lie. Nothing good comes of lying.
- if you can't enjoy the good things that are happening in your friends' lives, maybe that's your problem, not theirs. Revel in the positives that happen for them, because if something good is going on in your life you'd want them to revel in it with you. Don't make everything about you all the time.
- if somebody asks for your help, consider what it might have taken for them to be able to do that. Asking for help is really hard for some people. However big or small a thing it is, try and do it. You'll be a better person for it.
- if you know somebody going through a specifically tough time, ask them: 'how are you doing today?' Not, 'how are you doing', but add that 'today' in there. It acknowledges so much more about their reality.
- if you feel trapped, get out. This applies to relationships, to work, to countries, to anything. Chances are, if things have been bad for a while they're going to stay that way. Be proactive. Or quit complaining.
- if you are part of a family, eat meals together. Not on your knees in front of a TV, but at a table. Why is that such a strange and awkward expectation in today's world?
"Practice random acts of kindness, and senseless acts of beauty."
Friday, July 24, 2015
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Ranting at Three
Dear Sir/Madam,
Re: disconnection of Three services
I returned from the Emerald Isle yesterday morning – Ireland, sorely lacking in promised leprechauns – where, I was delighted to note prior to departure, I would be able to use my UK Three phone thanks to your 'Feel at Home' service. Since I anticipated the need to make a few phonecalls when there and check emails every now and then, it really was an excellent opportunity to take advantage of this service. To be on the safe side, I called 333 from my phone before I left and checked with a decidedly chatty individual whether or not my phone would work abroad. 'Yes', he confirmed. 'Go forth and phone!' (or words to that effect).
You can imagine my surprise and confusion, therefore, when I landed in Limerick airport on a decidedly freezing morning to discover that my phone would not work. It found no network. After a good deal of glaring, turning off and on again, and threatening to hurl the phone from the car window (the holy trinity of Fixing Phones, I'd say) I happened upon a Three store in Nenagh. The girl in there, burdened in a similar manner as I was at the time with a stinking cold, was incredibly helpful and managed to use the store phone to get in touch with the UK Three team.
And here is where I started to uncover a decidedly devious plot on your company's part. I was informed that no, my phone would not work abroad – despite earlier assurances by aforementioned chatty individual – and indeed I had been disconnected for 'abusing the Feel at Home service' (there's a lovely irony to that particular expression, I think you'll agree). Moreover, there was no way of reconnecting me.
Why, I asked, had I been disconnected? I appreciate that over the past eight months or so I have more often than not been abroad: France and Italy featured on there, along with Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and China. Some of those are included in the 'Feel at Home' service (I'm sure you know which, but just to clarify: Malaysia, Singapore and China are not) and I was delighted to note that, should I wish, I could therefore use my phone abroad at remarkably little expense or inconvenience. There would be no traipsing around looking for a Sim in every country I visited.
For many years now, I have been armed with a Nokia 3310 – a solid piece of engineering that stands up to the sort of treatment I throw at it. It is bounced around on a bike and crushed mercilessly into the smallest corner of a rucsac on a regular basis, and yet it persists in working. The battery life is incredible. Frankly, it's a gem. It is just about possible to use it to access my emails (and, on particularly whimsical days, Facebook) but that is pretty much where my use of it stops. Since I'm ordinarily in a location with WiFi and my iPad, I haven't really bothered to use these facilities. The occasional text letting my long-suffering mother know that I've arrived in yet another far-off land, and the even more rare phonecall (invariably to rant about an airline, or some such thing – mother also has a Three phone, much as she loathes the company, in order that we can take advantage of the free calls between our mobiles).
In France and Italy, I barely touched the thing except to make texts to international numbers which – as you well know – do not get to take advantage of 'Feel at Home' tariffs. Rather, I was charged fairly exorbitant sums for these texts but no matter, they kept me in contact with the outside world. In Hong Kong, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone without a Smartphone, and subsequently I became a bit of a social pariah since nobody wanted to contact me while having to pay for it. Look what WhatsApp has done to friendship.
I remember landing in Indonesia and making a brief call as I hurtled along in a taxi in the pitch dark to what I thought must be my certain doom. And then I went to Lombok, which is an absolutely stunning island and the perfect place in every way – including the fact there is zero phone reception there. Zero. Not only is there no reception, I went wandering around the island on my little scooter for a few weeks and completely forgot to take my beloved Nokia 3310 with me anyway. It lay there, unused, untouched, for the best part of two months.
Much against my plans, I was forced to return to Hong Kong for a few days in order to sort out a few banking issues there. I don't remember turning my phone on while in the city, but perhaps I did. All I know is that on 17th March I trotted up to China and my phone wouldn't work. Fairly obviously, I blamed the Chinese government. Blaming the government in the UK is one thing; blaming it in China is quite another. China is decidedly against people contacting the outside world, so I thought they were probably responsible for my phone-related misery at that point.
At some point in this missive, I should have noted that I am a single female traveller. I have lived and travelled around the world for the best part of ten years now and, touching every piece of wood currently in view, nothing spectacularly untoward has happened to me yet. This could perhaps be because I'm generally a practical individual, who always takes such sensible measures as arming herself with a working mobile phone.
Imagine this, then. I'm standing in a Three store in Nenagh in Ireland, being informed that I had been sent a 'notification' on 8th March (possibly the 6th, the exact date eludes me for the moment) informing me that I would be cut off from 17th March for – as I said before – abusing the terms of the 'Feel at Home' policy. A notification that I could never have received because I was using a Nokia 3310, something I imagine Three could well have been aware of since every time I've called your helpline you've always seemed to know that fact. Why is it you bombard me with irrelevant Three text messages at merry intervals, but you felt the need to send this rather important message as a 'notification' that could never arrive?
The funny thing is I have recently learned the difference between a 'notification' and a 'text' by merit of the fact I was given an old iPhone. Upon returning to the UK, I went into the Three store in Oxford to ask them to give me a new sim so that I could activate my whizzy new Smartphone (with the all-important WhatsApp so that I would no longer be a social pariah...). A Nokia 3310, you see, takes a Sim the size of a dinner plate. I paid £5 to get a Sim with my much-cherished number associated with it. I should note that the man who served me in the store was rude, patronising, unhelpful, and fundamentally wrong when it came to certain points about 'add-ons' but frankly those failings of his personality pale into insignificance when set alongside what Three as a company has done to me.
I have been with you for the best part of fourteen years now. I have had no complaints against you (apart from your generally useless coverage anywhere I appear to want to live in the UK) and have actually, thanks to never changing my number, been given work on the basis of a CV passed out four years beforehand. You see why I'm reluctant to change it? Who knows what might not be allowed to happen?!
Yet you have now put me in a ridiculous position. More to the point, you put me in an unsafe position. Three left me without access to a phone in China, with no way of knowing that this would happen, and with no explanation. Further to that, an individual at Three informed me my phone would indeed work abroad when clearly it would not.
As far as I can see, there are a few things due to me from Three:
- an apology. A sincere, fairly lengthy apology. I did not abuse any 'terms of service'; go and check exactly how many texts I sent or how many calls I made and try to justify that to any sane individual as 'abuse'. I have looked at the terms as detailed on your website. Read them, and try applying those to my situation and you'll see how ludicrous it is
- my phone to be restored to being a functional device that will work beyond UK shores. It's cold here and, quite frankly, I don't plan on being round much. I don't deliberately visit 'Feel at Home' countries, you know. You just have an awful lot of them.
- another apology. Because in this instance, one isn't enough. Frankly, you should be extraordinarily grateful that nothing happened to me in China during those few weeks I was without a phone because if it had, your company could have been held responsible. All because you were foolish enough to send a 'notification' to a non-notification compliant breed of phone.
I should note that, as I promised the individual I spoke to over the phone from the Three store in Nenagh, I have remarkably little to do this Summer and have all the time in the world to write to you or other potentially interested parties.
I would ask you to phone me to discuss the situation but unfortunately, I'm not actually sure my number works. Why? Because I had to buy a new Sim in Ireland in order to be able to make calls while I was there, and the girl in the store 'helpfully' sellotaped my UK Sim onto a piece of card so I wouldn't lose it. If only she had put the sellotape on the less-important plastic-only side... You can write to me at this address, or you can find me at the end of *********@gmail.com. If I don't hear back within a fortnight (30th April by my reckoning) you can rest assured that I will write again. And again. Ad infinitum.
In summary, the salient facts are these:
- without notifying me, you stopped my phone from functioning. This is in the first instance annoying, in the second dangerous and irresponsible.
- your website says that PAYG customers 'need to buy an Add-on... If you don't, you'll be charged at our special lower roaming rates'. I don't recall buying Add-ons that I actually used while abroad.
- 'If you exceed the allowances... when you're abroad in any two calendar months within a rolling 12 month period...'. I didn't. I never exceeded allowances; I'm on PAYG and can't.
- 'Feel at Home' is intended for our UK customers who are visiting... for short trips, like holidays or business trips.' My definition of 'holiday' or 'business trip' evidently differs from yours.
- '...this happens in any three months in a 12 month period, we may suspend international roaming on your account...'. I might have been abroad, but I wasn't using my phone. Punishing me for that is absolutely unnecessary and inappropriate. The use of the word 'may' implies a warning will be given. A warning was not given, because I was not capable of receiving it. That is your responsibility, not mine. I and the rest of the world do not need to be equipped with Smartphones for your convenience.
- Your terms constantly reference data usage. You can see how little I used. Look at my records.
You have until 30th April to send an appropriate reply. Without that response, I will either contact you again or some other potentially interested parties.
Yours faithfully,
Jane Thomas
Re: disconnection of Three services
I returned from the Emerald Isle yesterday morning – Ireland, sorely lacking in promised leprechauns – where, I was delighted to note prior to departure, I would be able to use my UK Three phone thanks to your 'Feel at Home' service. Since I anticipated the need to make a few phonecalls when there and check emails every now and then, it really was an excellent opportunity to take advantage of this service. To be on the safe side, I called 333 from my phone before I left and checked with a decidedly chatty individual whether or not my phone would work abroad. 'Yes', he confirmed. 'Go forth and phone!' (or words to that effect).
You can imagine my surprise and confusion, therefore, when I landed in Limerick airport on a decidedly freezing morning to discover that my phone would not work. It found no network. After a good deal of glaring, turning off and on again, and threatening to hurl the phone from the car window (the holy trinity of Fixing Phones, I'd say) I happened upon a Three store in Nenagh. The girl in there, burdened in a similar manner as I was at the time with a stinking cold, was incredibly helpful and managed to use the store phone to get in touch with the UK Three team.
And here is where I started to uncover a decidedly devious plot on your company's part. I was informed that no, my phone would not work abroad – despite earlier assurances by aforementioned chatty individual – and indeed I had been disconnected for 'abusing the Feel at Home service' (there's a lovely irony to that particular expression, I think you'll agree). Moreover, there was no way of reconnecting me.
Why, I asked, had I been disconnected? I appreciate that over the past eight months or so I have more often than not been abroad: France and Italy featured on there, along with Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and China. Some of those are included in the 'Feel at Home' service (I'm sure you know which, but just to clarify: Malaysia, Singapore and China are not) and I was delighted to note that, should I wish, I could therefore use my phone abroad at remarkably little expense or inconvenience. There would be no traipsing around looking for a Sim in every country I visited.
For many years now, I have been armed with a Nokia 3310 – a solid piece of engineering that stands up to the sort of treatment I throw at it. It is bounced around on a bike and crushed mercilessly into the smallest corner of a rucsac on a regular basis, and yet it persists in working. The battery life is incredible. Frankly, it's a gem. It is just about possible to use it to access my emails (and, on particularly whimsical days, Facebook) but that is pretty much where my use of it stops. Since I'm ordinarily in a location with WiFi and my iPad, I haven't really bothered to use these facilities. The occasional text letting my long-suffering mother know that I've arrived in yet another far-off land, and the even more rare phonecall (invariably to rant about an airline, or some such thing – mother also has a Three phone, much as she loathes the company, in order that we can take advantage of the free calls between our mobiles).
In France and Italy, I barely touched the thing except to make texts to international numbers which – as you well know – do not get to take advantage of 'Feel at Home' tariffs. Rather, I was charged fairly exorbitant sums for these texts but no matter, they kept me in contact with the outside world. In Hong Kong, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone without a Smartphone, and subsequently I became a bit of a social pariah since nobody wanted to contact me while having to pay for it. Look what WhatsApp has done to friendship.
I remember landing in Indonesia and making a brief call as I hurtled along in a taxi in the pitch dark to what I thought must be my certain doom. And then I went to Lombok, which is an absolutely stunning island and the perfect place in every way – including the fact there is zero phone reception there. Zero. Not only is there no reception, I went wandering around the island on my little scooter for a few weeks and completely forgot to take my beloved Nokia 3310 with me anyway. It lay there, unused, untouched, for the best part of two months.
Much against my plans, I was forced to return to Hong Kong for a few days in order to sort out a few banking issues there. I don't remember turning my phone on while in the city, but perhaps I did. All I know is that on 17th March I trotted up to China and my phone wouldn't work. Fairly obviously, I blamed the Chinese government. Blaming the government in the UK is one thing; blaming it in China is quite another. China is decidedly against people contacting the outside world, so I thought they were probably responsible for my phone-related misery at that point.
At some point in this missive, I should have noted that I am a single female traveller. I have lived and travelled around the world for the best part of ten years now and, touching every piece of wood currently in view, nothing spectacularly untoward has happened to me yet. This could perhaps be because I'm generally a practical individual, who always takes such sensible measures as arming herself with a working mobile phone.
Imagine this, then. I'm standing in a Three store in Nenagh in Ireland, being informed that I had been sent a 'notification' on 8th March (possibly the 6th, the exact date eludes me for the moment) informing me that I would be cut off from 17th March for – as I said before – abusing the terms of the 'Feel at Home' policy. A notification that I could never have received because I was using a Nokia 3310, something I imagine Three could well have been aware of since every time I've called your helpline you've always seemed to know that fact. Why is it you bombard me with irrelevant Three text messages at merry intervals, but you felt the need to send this rather important message as a 'notification' that could never arrive?
The funny thing is I have recently learned the difference between a 'notification' and a 'text' by merit of the fact I was given an old iPhone. Upon returning to the UK, I went into the Three store in Oxford to ask them to give me a new sim so that I could activate my whizzy new Smartphone (with the all-important WhatsApp so that I would no longer be a social pariah...). A Nokia 3310, you see, takes a Sim the size of a dinner plate. I paid £5 to get a Sim with my much-cherished number associated with it. I should note that the man who served me in the store was rude, patronising, unhelpful, and fundamentally wrong when it came to certain points about 'add-ons' but frankly those failings of his personality pale into insignificance when set alongside what Three as a company has done to me.
I have been with you for the best part of fourteen years now. I have had no complaints against you (apart from your generally useless coverage anywhere I appear to want to live in the UK) and have actually, thanks to never changing my number, been given work on the basis of a CV passed out four years beforehand. You see why I'm reluctant to change it? Who knows what might not be allowed to happen?!
Yet you have now put me in a ridiculous position. More to the point, you put me in an unsafe position. Three left me without access to a phone in China, with no way of knowing that this would happen, and with no explanation. Further to that, an individual at Three informed me my phone would indeed work abroad when clearly it would not.
As far as I can see, there are a few things due to me from Three:
- an apology. A sincere, fairly lengthy apology. I did not abuse any 'terms of service'; go and check exactly how many texts I sent or how many calls I made and try to justify that to any sane individual as 'abuse'. I have looked at the terms as detailed on your website. Read them, and try applying those to my situation and you'll see how ludicrous it is
- my phone to be restored to being a functional device that will work beyond UK shores. It's cold here and, quite frankly, I don't plan on being round much. I don't deliberately visit 'Feel at Home' countries, you know. You just have an awful lot of them.
- another apology. Because in this instance, one isn't enough. Frankly, you should be extraordinarily grateful that nothing happened to me in China during those few weeks I was without a phone because if it had, your company could have been held responsible. All because you were foolish enough to send a 'notification' to a non-notification compliant breed of phone.
I should note that, as I promised the individual I spoke to over the phone from the Three store in Nenagh, I have remarkably little to do this Summer and have all the time in the world to write to you or other potentially interested parties.
I would ask you to phone me to discuss the situation but unfortunately, I'm not actually sure my number works. Why? Because I had to buy a new Sim in Ireland in order to be able to make calls while I was there, and the girl in the store 'helpfully' sellotaped my UK Sim onto a piece of card so I wouldn't lose it. If only she had put the sellotape on the less-important plastic-only side... You can write to me at this address, or you can find me at the end of *********@gmail.com. If I don't hear back within a fortnight (30th April by my reckoning) you can rest assured that I will write again. And again. Ad infinitum.
In summary, the salient facts are these:
- without notifying me, you stopped my phone from functioning. This is in the first instance annoying, in the second dangerous and irresponsible.
- your website says that PAYG customers 'need to buy an Add-on... If you don't, you'll be charged at our special lower roaming rates'. I don't recall buying Add-ons that I actually used while abroad.
- 'If you exceed the allowances... when you're abroad in any two calendar months within a rolling 12 month period...'. I didn't. I never exceeded allowances; I'm on PAYG and can't.
- 'Feel at Home' is intended for our UK customers who are visiting... for short trips, like holidays or business trips.' My definition of 'holiday' or 'business trip' evidently differs from yours.
- '...this happens in any three months in a 12 month period, we may suspend international roaming on your account...'. I might have been abroad, but I wasn't using my phone. Punishing me for that is absolutely unnecessary and inappropriate. The use of the word 'may' implies a warning will be given. A warning was not given, because I was not capable of receiving it. That is your responsibility, not mine. I and the rest of the world do not need to be equipped with Smartphones for your convenience.
- Your terms constantly reference data usage. You can see how little I used. Look at my records.
You have until 30th April to send an appropriate reply. Without that response, I will either contact you again or some other potentially interested parties.
Yours faithfully,
Jane Thomas
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
