Calling Cards - you definitely don't get to call the cards!!
One of the inevitable essentials for anyone staying away from one's home country is a “calling card” to be able to call folks back home. Of course, one may have gone away from one's home country for the express purpose of being far away from the folks back home, but that still does not permit one the escape from the weekly or fortnightly routine of calling to say "everything is just fine, Mom, we are completely snowed in, probably can't get out of the house for the next two days, running rather low on supplies, but everything is fine."
Telephone companies, as a general rule, believe that if you really want to call international from your home phone, you must either be frightfully rich, so you can afford the charges or you are completely insane, so it doesn’t really matter how much you are charged. And for all those who fall in between these two extremes - the neither evilly rich nor utterly batty ones - there are always the calling cards.
Most of the calling cards have such flamboyant names; the more sedate ones are often the “Good Morning” cards…Good Morning Asia, Good Morning India, Good Morning Sudan, Good Morning Vietnam…well, you get the general idea. So, if your dreams had ever included being an early morning radio show host, this is the card you go for. You’d of course find common ones, no matter which country you go to, displaying a frightful lack of originality – cards like Talk Big, Big Talk, Mega Talk, Talk Mega, Long Talk, Talk Long – you get the general idea again, I am sure.
The really uncanny thing about these calling cards is the amount of time you get to talk on any card. As you plod manfully (or womanfully, if you please. I am not trying to be sexist) through the array of brochures trying to find the card that best suits you, you stumble upon one that looks tempting. $10 only, and you can talk till the cows come home. Out comes the wallet, with a tenner, and the card is all yours. You rush home to parade your acumen to your wife…”there, now you can speak to your hearts’ content, and ne’er a worry shall alight upon your fair head.”
What you’ve obviously failed to read is the small print. Come now, there is always the small print to anything you buy, or didn’t you know that? And the small print says something like “on a single use only”. You realize what that actually means only after you’ve made a few calls using the card. In your infinite intelligence and resourcefulness, you probably have already calculated just how many people you can call using the card.
Telephone companies, as a general rule, believe that if you really want to call international from your home phone, you must either be frightfully rich, so you can afford the charges or you are completely insane, so it doesn’t really matter how much you are charged. And for all those who fall in between these two extremes - the neither evilly rich nor utterly batty ones - there are always the calling cards.
Most of the calling cards have such flamboyant names; the more sedate ones are often the “Good Morning” cards…Good Morning Asia, Good Morning India, Good Morning Sudan, Good Morning Vietnam…well, you get the general idea. So, if your dreams had ever included being an early morning radio show host, this is the card you go for. You’d of course find common ones, no matter which country you go to, displaying a frightful lack of originality – cards like Talk Big, Big Talk, Mega Talk, Talk Mega, Long Talk, Talk Long – you get the general idea again, I am sure.
The really uncanny thing about these calling cards is the amount of time you get to talk on any card. As you plod manfully (or womanfully, if you please. I am not trying to be sexist) through the array of brochures trying to find the card that best suits you, you stumble upon one that looks tempting. $10 only, and you can talk till the cows come home. Out comes the wallet, with a tenner, and the card is all yours. You rush home to parade your acumen to your wife…”there, now you can speak to your hearts’ content, and ne’er a worry shall alight upon your fair head.”
What you’ve obviously failed to read is the small print. Come now, there is always the small print to anything you buy, or didn’t you know that? And the small print says something like “on a single use only”. You realize what that actually means only after you’ve made a few calls using the card. In your infinite intelligence and resourcefulness, you probably have already calculated just how many people you can call using the card.
A twenty-minute call to the parents, you say, and another twenty to the in-laws. Then, there is Aunt Usha, who has to be called at least once a month, or she’ll think you have forgotten your favourite aunt. There would, quite obviously, be the odd Uncle Vasu and the occasional Cousin Anand who have migrated to the USA in search of greener pastures. Then, there all the friends who were with you at college and school, and friends who were with your wife during her college and school. So you finally, draw the line across the little notebook you use to calculate your expenses, and tell yourself, not without a little pride, “Hundred minutes for ten dollars! Pretty good, what?”
Merrily, you begin to make your calls according to plan, sticking religiously to the twenty-minute routine. You are understandably thrilled at hearing the tinny recording “You have ten dollars left. Please dial the number you wish to reach….” The thrill is noticeably lesser when you make your second call. You swear by the stopwatch you’ve been using that you have only spoken for twenty minutes on your first call, yet the voice says with authority, “You have six dollars left. Please dial…”
By the time you reach the third call, you are straining to hear correctly…but the fateful voice goes on, completely unaware, and even if marginally aware, entirely unmindful of the turmoil in you, “You have two dollars left.” Now you have to choose who you want to call. Uncle Vasu and Aunt Usha are carefully weighed in the scales of your mind. After painful deliberation, you finally call the aunt, and before you can say hello, the ominous voice speaks again, “You have one minute left. This call will be disconnected if you do not recharge your card.”
Merrily, you begin to make your calls according to plan, sticking religiously to the twenty-minute routine. You are understandably thrilled at hearing the tinny recording “You have ten dollars left. Please dial the number you wish to reach….” The thrill is noticeably lesser when you make your second call. You swear by the stopwatch you’ve been using that you have only spoken for twenty minutes on your first call, yet the voice says with authority, “You have six dollars left. Please dial…”
By the time you reach the third call, you are straining to hear correctly…but the fateful voice goes on, completely unaware, and even if marginally aware, entirely unmindful of the turmoil in you, “You have two dollars left.” Now you have to choose who you want to call. Uncle Vasu and Aunt Usha are carefully weighed in the scales of your mind. After painful deliberation, you finally call the aunt, and before you can say hello, the ominous voice speaks again, “You have one minute left. This call will be disconnected if you do not recharge your card.”
As you stare in bewilderment at your wife, she points out the small print that you had failed to read: ‘on a single use only.’ And then it dawns upon you, like sunrise upon the snowy Himalayan peaks – if you made just one call with the card, then, you could speak till the cows came home for ten dollars. No, I don’t mean the cows come home for ten dollars, I mean you can speak that long for ten dollars.
After burning increasingly large holes in my wallet, I have now become decidedly wiser. Poorer, but wiser. I have stopped using calling cards, no matter how fancy the name, or how much time the cows are given to come home. I have switched to internet telephony. PC-to-Phone is my mantra now. How phony that is I am yet to find out; perhaps I might even pen my thoughts about that here, one day, but for now it suits my budget best. Besides, I know exactly how the money is being spent, and there are no more tinny voices to tell me how much I have left, thank you very much.
Very true. Those cards can be a pain. You never realize how long you're talking with someone until you actually time yourself.
Posted by
AnonymousBlogger |
2:54 PM
:) This is something most if not all of us can talk about! Just as we find one service provider/calling card that is good, clear and you can get the line through in a single try, someone else finds one that is cheaper and very good!
So there you go, you are tempted to try that one... the person who recommended forgot to tell you about the small print and you don't notice it either because your "best friend" recommended it and it should be great!
And the cycle repeats itself all over again! It is hillarious and interesting to find people calling UK nos from Ireland through a service provider which says free Ireland to UK calls and then uses a UK service provider to dial India!
Posted by
Anonymous |
7:55 PM