I’ve Got One Hand in My Pocket…

An unsettling trend has arisen among prepaid providers over the course of the last year or so. It started, as is often the case, with AT&T; they increased the cost of per-use text messaging on their Pay-As-You-Go and Pick Your Plan schedules from 5 cents to 15 cents per message sent or received. Earlier this year they raised the price again, to 20 cents. Virgin Mobile also raised the price of their per-use messaging from 5 cents to 10 cents; only Tracfone has maintained its messaging rates over the course of the last several years, at .3 and .5 units for Tracfone and Net10, respectively.

Most of the time, such an exorbitant rate hike is accompanied by the release of messaging packages which pare the cost of each sent and received message to 2.5 cents or less – except in the case of T-Mobile, who’ve yet to announce any new increases – so looking at l’image grande, it’s really only a rate hike for those of us who are too lazy or too stubborn to sign up for the packages. Some carriers make signing up easy, like Virgin and Verizon, who’ll gladly apply a recurring monthly charge to your prepaid balance in order to pay for the text packages, but others (cough-AT&T-cough-sputter) make it a pain in the ass on the order of applying for a student loan. No, you can’t have my mother’s maiden name, you duplicitous sons-a-bitches.

In order to get the monthly text packages on three family GoPhones with AT&T, I had to call their automated customer flagellation line and wade through a series of menu prompts that would have made Justinian and Theodora beam with Byzantine relish, and I had to do this with each phone. The entire process took about a half-hour every month, until I got sick of wasting what would have become – over the course of the next ten years – time equivalent to a two-week vacation, doing nothing but provisioning the text messaging on three phones. I think it was Marcus Aurelius who phrased it best when he wrote, “fuck that noise.”

It wasn’t such a big deal in the small scheme of things, but it was the grand scheme of things that bothered me; with time and persistence the little things add up to the big, and without the proper temporal diligence you wake up one morning to wonder where the hell your life went, and suddenly realize that a significant portion of it was spent trying to get a phone company to take your friggin’ money. Paying for a single aspect of service from one business entity should never be that time-consuming, so that was the beginning of the end of my association with AT&T. Sorry, plicks.

I have no problem with phone companies raising their rates to whatever the market will support (and no, it’s not “price gouging” as one Fulbright candidate in economics put it on Howard Forums); what bothers me is a total disregard for the value of my time, when other carriers have found a way to eliminate that imposition with the aforementioned recurring monthly balance deduction.

Every transaction between two parties is, at its most basic level, an exchange of value; they get my money, I use their service, and ideally everybody’s happy because everyone agreed to the terms and gave their value willingly. The one area in which I will not compromise, though, is when unwarranted claims are made upon my time; time is my sole non-negotiable, non-renewable commodity, and I’ve quit a number of jobs over the last ten years because virtually no businesses understand this, in regard to both their customers and employees; the quickest and surest way to send me packing is to demonstrate indifference, or worse – contempt – for my time.

I don’t give a greasy Cadbury Easter shit if they raise their text or voice rates through the roof and want to force people to sign up for packages out the meat-hole, but unless they can make it convenient (I don’t want to think about it beyond adding money to my account, ever), I’ll take my hardly earned scratch elsewhere, thanks. It takes a special kind of arrogance to assume that I’ll be willing to jump through hoop after corporate hoop to suck down their Smugberry Kool-Aid in the form of telephone prompts and half-assed voice recognition systems that more than half the time don’t recognize anything, and certainly don’t make it any easier to obtain the very same thing that I previously received with no undue effort whatsoever. It had been simple; 5 cents per text, right out of the phone, no mess, no hassle; instant value. Then I had to carefully track the dates of each message pack’s expiration, or risk losing the remaining balance (and, by extension, the lower per-message rate), with much too little received in exchange.

That, coupled with their weak coverage in these-here particulars (FYI, a hamster with rubber boots and a note pad scurrying across a high-tension wire does not constitute a communications network), contributed to our migration first to a contract account, then to a more consumer-friendly conglomerate entirely. I’m a sucker for things that work the way they’re supposed to, and around here Verizon does just that, while at the same time demonstrating a healthy respect for my time, and ultimately, our exchange of mutual value in the consumer-provider relationship.

And I Feel Fine…

There’s a lot of buzz in the pseudo-scientific community about the possibility of the world coming to an end on the final day of the Mayan calendar, which happens to fall on the Winter Solstice, 2012. A Friday. Wouldn’t you know it.

For those who might glean some sort of mystical self-righteousness from assuming that the universe is disposed towards a base-ten number system, and who see portent and disaster in the arrangement of digits in the date 12/21/12, I offer the following advice; get over yourselves. I know for a fact that the hubbub over the 2012 thing is so much manufactured tripe, because I’ve got the most dire harbinger of Armageddonous calamity right here on my desk, and it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the Maya, Y2K, or the approach of Apophis in 2029.

It is the Samsung Sway, and surely it foretells the End of Days.

The Sway is a slick little slider from Verizon, a company with which, thanks to our rancorous parting back in early 2003, I thought I’d do business again only when it began to rain frogs amidst widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth. I said some things, they said some things, they got the dishes, and I got the dog, but in the end it all turned out okay; they recently sent a spiffy arrangement of 1900 MHz antennae atop a long-stemmed tower about a mile away, which was the finest gesture of apology I’ve ever received. So we’re good, Verizon and me, and I finally know what Peaches and Herb were talking about all those years ago.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, the CDMA technology used by Verizon, Sprint, and various MVNOs and regional carriers in the US is unquestionably superior to its GSM counterpart when viewed from the business perspective. It offers much higher call capacity per channel than GSM, which allows carriers to service a greater number of users with less equipment, and the very fact that such a complex system could even be engineered to work reliably is truly one of the technological marvels of the 20th century. That said, from the consumer’s standpoint, I’ve always preferred the flexibility of GSM and the SIM card, which allowed me to switch phones at my leisure.

So for a provider and a handset manufacturer to lure me away from the world of instantaneous SIM-swapping would have required some seriously potent mojo, which the aforementioned tower and now the Sway have provided in big, sloppy buckets. The fact that I was willing to switch providers, pay the ETFs on three phones, and hop off the Happy Handset Museum-Go-Round speaks Tolkienesque volumes about how poor the previous service was in my neck of the woods; AT&T was the most reliable provider, and that’s stretching the word “reliable” to its vermicelli-thin limit. Having to move the phone around the house to find a signal strong enough to simply send a text message got rather old in a hurry.

Verizon offers a wide selection of impressive hardware, from the LG Dare to the new Motorola Krave and the unique switch-flip Samsung Juke, but the Sway won me over with a simple yet elegant form factor, a startlingly crisp QVGA screen, and clear sound. Strictly as a bonus, it’s got the most customizable menus that I’ve seen on a Verizon handset, including options for list, grid, and tabbed views, and five separate color schemes for each. The keys are constructed of a flat, brushed metallic material that offers superior tactile feedback and solid, creak-free construction. It lacks EVDO (high-speed data) and a 2.5mm headset jack, but it’s got a 2.0 megapixel camera and a microSD slot on the outside of the phone, not buried beneath the battery.

The phone that I returned in order to get the Sway, the Motorizr Z6tv, had a bad case of rattles and a sticky clear key, along with a smaller screen and a much less customizable interface. Not a bad phone, really, but if you’re going to live with something for the length of a contract, it’s important to get something you like. Also, the shiny bastard was a fingerprint nightmare, which drives me absolutely crazy. 

So the world didn’t come to an end as I picked up the Sway, slid the face up and down a few times, played with the keys and tested the call quality before deciding that this was the phone for me, but I think it might have shuddered a little. Not only is the Sway on a network I never thought I’d use again, it’s based on a technology that I swore off only months ago in favor of versatility over function, from a company whose handsets have traditionally given me a headache with their arbitrary design decisions and spotty reception. I no longer have to seek the signal hotspot simply to make a call or send a message, and the effect is a startling feeling of normalcy. 

It’s strange that no one is interviewing any Maya scholars to interpret the meaning of the end of their calendar – all the doomsaying has so far come from professional doom mongers – but what can you expect from a society where mysticism and fear are prized above reason, logic, and knowledge.  I don’t know what phone I’ll be using on Friday, December 21st, 2012, but I’ll wager it’ll get better reception than the metaphorical radio o’ willful ignorance from which some people glean their entire philosophy.