Tigy’s Blog

Goodbye Telecom, hello Vodafone!!

I hate Telecom, or at least strongly dislike them and their attitude to me over the last several years.

Arrogant is the word I would use, stupid also comes to mind.  They have lost my business over $100 they forced me to pay for moving house, actually its worse than that because I agreed to pay half of it, fair cop getting charged to change your number, but charging me to disconnect and then again to reconnect seemed criminal to me.  I mean I was never actually disconnected, they admitted it didn’t cost them anything like that to move me over and that they only did it because they could.  I think the exact words they used were: “If we had some competition we probably couldn’t get away with charging this.”

Little lesson for Telecom here (and to my new friends at Vodafone if they’re listening).

You fought hard to squeeze $50 out of me when I moved.  I told you I would leave you when I got a chance.  I moved but you got your $50 - what did it cost you?

Lets see, I’ve been with you for about 15 years, lately spending about $90 a month and intending to keep doing that.  So over 15 years that’s $16,200 dollars worth of revenue for you.  But you did get your $50 so we can offset that against your loss, and 15 years is a long time so lets call it 10.  That means you’re down $10,750 dollars - not allowing for any inflation over the next 10 years.  Throw into that the cost of all the advertising you’ll do to try and win my business back, the TV, telemarketing and so forth and it’s not looking good.  Perhaps you should have just charged me the $50 to move house like I told you, and you admitted, was fair.

Just for the record this is a concept called Customer Lifetime Value and CLV is sometimes made a much more complicated equation than this.  I’ve spent hours pouring over numbers to accurately calculate CLV but at the end of the day it really is a simple concept and should be implemented simply.

Anyway I’ve moved it all over to Vodafone now, phone, broadband and mobile.  The outgoing caller ID on our phone is finally working (which Telecom said was a problem with our phone) and my internet speeds have shot up. My previous (Slingshot) full speed plan was giving me between 25-250 kb/s download (yes they had the cheek to call this ‘broadband’) and about 100k upload. My test last night delivered 8000kb down and 650kb up, at its worst thats 320 times faster - iTunes actually works again and a 3 minute Youtube video isn’t taking 15 minutes to load!! I’m a happy guy.

Today our big girl turns 5, wow I can’t believe its 5 years already!

She’s off to school tomorrow, a whole new phase in her life. We’re immensely proud of all she’s achieved so far and are really excited about what the future holds. As a parent it’s a strange feeling this, a mix of excitement and pride at their growth, but also sadness that the time we’ve had so far as been so fleeting.

I guess the moral of the story is always make the most of now!

Dear World, I bequeath to you today one little girl in a crispy blue dress with two blue eyes, happy laugh that ripples all day long and a flash of blonde hair that bounces in the sunlight when she runs. I trust you’ll treat her well. She’s slipping out of the backyard of my heart this morning and skipping off down the street to her first day of school. Never again will she be completely mine. Prim and proper, she’ll wave a young independent hand this morning and say “bye”, and walk with little lady steps to school. She’ll learn to stand in lines and wait by the alphabet for her name to be called. She’ll learn to tune her ears for sounds of school bells and deadlines, and she’ll learn to giggle, and gossip, and look at the ceiling in a disinterested way. She’ll learn to be jealous. She’ll learn how not to cry. No longer will she have time to sit a hot summer day and watch an ant scurry across a crack in the sidewalk. Nor will she have time to pop out of bed with the dawn to kiss daisies in the morning dew. No… Now, she’ll worry about important things like grades and which dress to wear and whose best friend is whose. She’ll forget her blocks and dolls, and now she’ll find new heroes. For five full years now, I’ve been her sage and Santa Claus, playmate, Father and friend. Now she’ll learn to share her worship with her teachers. No longer will I be the smartest, greatest man in the whole world. When that school bell rings for the first time, she’ll learn what it means to be a member of the group, with all its privileges and its disadvantages. She’ll learn in time that proper ladies do not laugh out loud or kiss dogs or keep frogs in pickle jars, or even watch ants scurry across cracks in the summer sidewalk. Tomorrow, she’ll learn for the first time that all who smile at her are not her friends, and I’ll stand out the front and watch her start out on the long lonely journey to becoming a woman. So world, I bequeath to you today, one little girl in a crispy blue dress with two blue eyes and a happy laugh that ripples all day long, and a flash of blonde hair that bounces in the sunlight when she runs. I trust you will treat her well.