Dear Editor,
So, a few weeks ago, you might remember, I wrote here how TelEm was in the process of trying to steal my money from me. They took a year’s worth of payments in advance, gave me a carved-in-stone receipt that says that, and then four months early they say, “sorry, you’re out of money.” I showed them their own receipt that says in real words “Paid in Full for One Year”. All dated and stamped. Their response was, “We’ll see and get back to you.” My tag line at the end of my last letter were words to the effect “Anyone want to bet how this will turn out?”
Well, now we know. TelEm is going to steal my money and not give me anything for it. In the law in the U.S. that’s called “Criminal Conversion” and it gets people thrown in jail and when it’s a company they get slammed with punitive damages sometimes in the six and seven figures.
I’m not sure what would happen here but I am sure the public prosecutor would just roll his eyes back and suggest that I get a life or something and the judge in the Court of First Instance would probably wonder why in hell I was wasting her time when she was looking at a court case for a couple hundred dollars. And they would both be correct. Courts and prosecutions are for serious business and a couple hundred dollars wouldn’t pay for the prosecutor’s lunch that day. So TelEm gets to steal my money and there is, effectively, nothing I can do about it.
After 20 years of being here you would think I would get used to it but it never ceases to annoy me.
So, I hump over to Coral and sign up over there. I have used them before and still do elsewhere and never had any meaningful complaints, so as an alternative to the thieves at TelEm, they were a perfectly good option. Turns out to be much better than that. Their service, which is exactly the same price as the thieves at TelEm, turns out to be functionally 3 times as fast. On paper the specs may be the same but in practice, WOW! It’s so much better that it’s scary.
And that’s the point here. Instead of TelEm being honest and simply giving me what they promised and that I paid for, they drove me to their competitor who, as it turns out, is superior in all respects. In business school they have a highly technical name for that. It’s called “being stupid”. And because they are monumentally stupid, now you and everyone else knows who you are dealing with when you walk through the doors of TelEm. If you trust them, you are being, well, stupid as well.
The moral of the story here is, if you have TelEm Internet, dump them for Coral. You will be much happier bunnies. I certainly am.
Steven Johnson
