- by Owen Morton
Every month on the 21st, I get a little text message. This is an unusual event and is enough to make me very happy, because I get so few text messages that I have come to realise that nobody likes me. When I get this message on the 21st, I have a few happy seconds before I discover that the message is from O2.
Now, I don’t like O2. I wouldn’t like them even if they weren’t in the business of giving me false hopes of a social life every month, but since they are, they regularly upset me considerably. This little message of theirs on the 21st always says that I must top up at least £15 before the 27th, otherwise I won’t get my free 150 minutes of calls. This month on the 21st, my balance stood at £0.04, and had been that way for some while. The result of their message (not surprisingly for those who know me) was to harden my resolve to not put any money on my phone until at earliest, the 28th.
I go through a sequence of events very much like this every month. The end result is, of course, a second text message on the 27th saying, in what I rightly or wrongly perceive to be an aggrieved tone of voice, “You’re not benefitting from your free Talkalotmore minutes this month because you didn’t top up at least £15.” What seems to have escaped O2’s attention is that I am benefitting from not spending any money on my phone, which, for a social recluse like myself, is a considerably greater benefit than having some free minutes, because I don’t have anyone to call anyway.
In essence, therefore, O2 are doing themselves out of business by sending me irksome little texts every month begging me to top up, which only appeal to my pig-headedness and reduce my chances of topping up from ‘unlikely’ to ‘non-existent’. Frankly, the only use I have for my phone is to play Hungry Fish on it, which is a game in which I control a fish who swims around eating other fish, and I would respectfully submit that if Hungry Fish were to unceremoniously depart from my life, I would not be terribly upset.
I would like to end this discussion by requesting that O2 stop sending me texts and also stop phoning me up under the misguided impression that because I own one of their phones, I would also like to buy home insurance from them. Because I don’t. And while we’re at it, Virgin can stop doing the same. And most importantly of all, Subway can stop dropping booklets of leaflets for their miserable subs through my door.