So my cellphone company calls me and proposes me some deal where I'm
supposed to commit to a year and a half in return for some price
reduction. I usually hang up on them before hearing the details but
today for some reason I heard through the thing and agreed.
An SMS promptly arrives notifying me that I agreed to 81 months of
commitment in return for a reduced price for 063 minutes per month,
whereas they talked about several hours or something. Having lost my
temper already due to communication with my car leasing company, I call
their customer support number, crawl through the hateful voice menus
having the guts to tell me that they are new voice menus, more efficient
and clear than previous voice menus, asking me for my cellphone number
multiple times, etc. I finally get a human being and tell her that I've
now been their customer for way too long, yada yada yada, hate hate
hate, WTF is this SMS I just got.
She checks with the computer and tells me that I'm committed to 18
months in return for a reduced price for 360 minutes... Waitaminnit.
Turns out that the brand new HTC Desire phone, running Android version
whatever, can not properly render bidirectional text, or the simple
special case of Hebrew with numbers in it, for that matter - which is
pretty unidirectional right-to-left text, really, that just happens to
be handled by the same standard. Unlike my previous, 5x cheaper phone -
that admittedly lacked GPS, camera, or an Angry Birds application that
would occupy the attention of my roommates and guests to the point of
effectively subtracting them from our workforce.
I would have been more embarrassed if I went completely over the top on
the phone over this, and less embarrassed if I haven't wasted many hours
of my professional life struggling with defective bidi support on
various hand-held devices in the past. I'm embarrassed enough to beg you
not to embarrass me any further by commenting on whatever our outgoing
mail server will append to my message.
This mail was sent via Mail-SeCure system.
