After years of bouncing from one free wireless access point to another, I finally picked up a smartphone with a data plan recently. Then I got rid of that crappy smartphone and got an iPhone. It’s nice having Internet access mostly everywhere. It’s less nice dealing with the mobile phone company.
I’ll set aside my problems with Virgin’s “image”, because they’re irrelevant here. What’s bothering me today is their billing scheme. And I’m not even talking about the massive industry-wide rort that is “value”, as in “$300 value for only $30 a month!” which if it were true would mean the company would go out of business in a second. No, let me describe the situation that has me cranky today:
I pay $19 a month on Virgin’s Your Cap pre-paid plan. Sorry, $19 per 28 days. This $19 nets me:
- 19 Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks, to be spent on their ludicrous call and text costs.
- 31 Bonus Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks, to also be spent on their ludicrous call and text costs.
- 1001MB of mobile data. Leftover data rolls over if I top up within 28 days, up to a maximum of 5005MB.
My first problem is that the system doesn’t do a very good job of telling me when I need to top up, such that this morning I lost all my leftover credit and had to start over because I was waiting for the last day of my current cycle to top up. Fair enough, my bad, I should have topped up earlier.
Except, as I have been told (will test it myself next time), if I topped up early then my next 28 day cycle would start from that day, instead of adding on to the end of my existing cycle.
So in order to not get a little bit ripped off, I need to jump online as late as possible and hit the “Recharge” button. If only there were some sort of auto-recharge function. Oh look, there is!
Except, the only options available are to recharge when my credit reaches a certain threshold, or on a specified day each month. I use maybe $20 of my Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks a month, tops, so the first option is no use to me. As for the second, my prepaid plan operates on 28 day cycles, not monthly. So if I set it to auto-recharge on the first of each month, I’m going to be without mobile access for a couple of days each month.
So their systems are actively customer-hostile. But I’m not going to leave, because they’re cheap enough, so whatever. This has all been meaningless.
But seriously, fuck you Virgin Mobile.