Ghost in the Machine

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That's the message I get from MTN every now and then after I've made a call or sent an SMS. Here's the funny thing, no one at MTN knows what it is or what causes it, and that's the thing about technology, it always does things you don't expect it to. MTN will obviously tell me that it's nothing but a glitch in the system and that it shouldn't affect my ability to use their services but I have to ask, what the hell is it? I once received a flurry of cash back messages from them and no cash! Ever since, I haven't received any cash back. Okay, they don't owe me that much or maybe I just haven't loaded enough airtime but I feel a bit hard done by. After several years as market leaders, I think they've lost their edge, they don't seem to care about what the customer needs. I imagine they've been going through some tough shit with the recession and all but what makes them think I haven't been going through the same?

MTN's gotten expensive or I have gotten poorer or both, either way I don't think I can afford to use their services exclusively so I am moving to other networks. WARID seems good; their ghost gives me credit when someone calls me from another network not to mention those free calls. I hope they can maintain that, I will support them in this endeavour. UTL has one of the most annoying customer care operations. These guys think you're daft, that saying sorry all the time will fix their problems and they forget that some of us know a little bit about this stuff. I haven't tried ORANGE yet but their data service seems to be the best available on the market; however, they run the risk of lacking enough capacity to support the service in case the market decides to adopt it full scale (much like the UTL and MTN GPRS bundles). I could do with an unlimited internet package because I like downloading a lot of stuff, the idea of being limited to a few GB is ridiculous.