Open Letter to Unsuspecting Simpletons

Dear Confounded Morons:

I wish, hope and even pray that this:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/vacationing-family-hit-with-10-000-movie-bill-1.1229301

is the last story I will ever read respecting an wholely, good, kind and unsuspecting citizen who has, to great horror and surprise, received a whopping bill from his cellular carrier as a result of data charges while out-of-country. If history carries any weight, however, I fear that in another four to six months, we'll be hit, again, with another story of the same ilk. Although initial stories of this sort were about consumer victimization when they surfaced six or seven years ago during the initial explosion of smartphone availability, it seems to me that in the intervening period, the victim ship has sailed. To me, John Gibson of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, this is a story about your shocking level of ignorance. Where have you been for the last half-decade?

First of all, your charges were not a "movie bill". Granted, that was probably a headline generated by CBC, but none-the-less, it implies that somehow the use of shocking sums of data were rather innocent and should be compared, in value, to the cost of "a few movies" in some other context, like a movie rental or a theatre ticket, which you were apparently too lazy or cheap to actually buy. Why the hell were your kids sitting inside in front of the computer anyway when they had the benefit of the Arizona heat, which clearly cost a pretty sum in airfare to provide to them? Couldn't you at least make vacation a little bit exciting - take in a theatrical experience, or maybe go to the damn zoo, even. Make no mistake, the product you purchased was not "movies" but "data". Had you downloaded music, tv shows or porn, it's all ones and zeros to the network - it's all just data. These oversize roaming bills are almost always foisted upon children, as if the predatory phone companies are praying on the innocence of infants and crushing the soles of children. I guess it would be more difficult to run the media play if the headline was "vacationing family hit with $10,000.00 pornography bill".

I just hopped off a plane in Arizona last night and, despite that my cellular data was turned-off, SaskTel - the same carrier that cold-heartedly bilked Mr. Gibson of his children's happiness - sent me no fewer than THREE text messages warning of the various rates for data roaming and advising what to do about it - they even provided a link to call for the addition of a US data plan.

Mr. Gibson - welcome to 2014. Please hop off the ignorance train. If I have to read another story of this nature in the Saskatchewan news, I'm sending a personal letter to the complainant on behalf of phone carriers, which is really saying something, because at the end of it all, I too, believe that most carriers are jerks.