Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Virgin on the ridiculous

Yesterday I went to K-Mart again. I had resolved to buy one of their $99 prepaid Virgin mobile phones I had seen earlier in the week. Lo and behold, yesterday they had them marked down to $55. Wow! For that price the tiny Siemens A55 handset came with a rapid charger, a spare case, $15 worth of prepaid calls and a really cool fabric drinks-chiller emblazoned with the Virgin logo. Really important was that the phone had a lithium-ion battery which is supposed to provide 300 hours of standby time and 5 hours of talk time.

For me it needed to be a Virgin phone because that is what I had before. The old one was a Motorola unit – it worked okay but it had a nicad battery. Nicads are painfully unreliable and eventually die. So it did. The cost of a replacement battery was about fifty bucks, if you could find one.

However the main reason was because when Virgin started up a few years back their prepaid SIM cards had an unlimited life, so my wife and I each bought a hundred dollar card while they were on offer. Each of us still has a credit of about ninety dollars. Virgin soon realised that this effectively might give careful phone users like us a lifetime service for free, and so they introduced an expiry time. Too late. They have said they will honour ours until they are used up, so at our rate of usage this might take a few years yet. Even so their current deal for new customers is quite good and with an initial $15 credit there is 180 days access. A $50 recredit is viable for a year, which seems pretty reasonable to me.

So I gets me the new phone home yesterday see, and I can tell you that when any new gadget like this arrives there are is no end of advice from all the other individuals living here on how to set it up. The most important first act was to install the old SIM card so that my old account remained viable. Yep, everything worked as it was supposed too. Did I hear a groan coming down the line from Virgin chief Richard Branson?

Now the arrival of this new phone immediately set the wheels whirring in the minds of our 15 year old twins, recently cashed up from their new part-time jobs at KFC. I had originally said that they didn’t need a mobile phone – they could use ours. But it’s not the same thing is it.

So this morning we nipped back to K-Mart and were on their doorstep before they opened. My figuring was that the $55 was a runout price and the things were not going to last. I was correct, they had two left – phew!

So now we have four Virgins in the house and we can SMS eachother “Virgin to Virgin” for five cents a time. 20 cents to other phones not fortunate enough to be in the Virgin network, like my number three son currently swanning about in Europe. All the other Virgin charges seem much cheaper than the competitors too.

The twins have had their lecture on the perils of the phone world, like being beware of downloading games and new sounds. These all have a cost, and will soon use up any credit. But they don’t think like me. On this point the kids are lightning fast compared to me in coming to grips with the many other complex features of these things. I can hear them both beeping away in the next room. They are hooked. Mr Branson can probably relax.

All in all there are eight private cell phones operating from this house, plus those of my sons’ girlfriends who spend almost as much time here as they do in their own homes. Oh and there are my sons’ work phones too – switched off thankfully.

Now I must away and send the Virgins a test email to the kids. I have learned all Virgin mobile users have a “free” email address linked to their phone via virginvibe.com.au. “Hello – Testing 123!”

© MMIV Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out the index of my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days. Topical – often humorous – no swearing – no porn – no spam – no soliciting – no religious mania – no smoking – no catches.

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