A call FROM Ancel - very surprising

So over the past couple of months I've gotten in the habit of sending SMS messages to a friend in Uruguay. When she sends responses, they go nowhere. She said she called their customer service (and I'm sure she did) and they said they would look into it.

Right. Let's see... Uruguayan company gets complaint from subscriber who's locked into a contract anyway.

Let's look at the decision tree both ways. It costs nothing to not look into it. They probably still bill for the sent message because they probably have to pay something to the receiving carrier, T-Mobile in the USA. So they've not burned any man-hours, they collected a few pesos for a sent text message and its all profit because they don't have to pay anything to the receiving carrier.

If they look into it, it costs man hours. That's not very expensive in Uruguay. However if they fix the problem they would then have to start paying the receiving carrier some small settlement amount per received text message - thus offsetting whatever tiny expenditure they had in labor.

These business considerations are all secondary to the cultural perception that "We paid a lot of money to put this equipment in, therefore it should work miracles and never ever fail even though we don't bother about spending time and money to do scheduled maintenance (it gets circular at this point) because they paid a lot of money to put it in.

I called T-mobile and told them of the problem. I know that Ancel is going to listen to another GSM carrier much more than they would a customer. I'm certain thats why I got the call this morning.

In any event, I will be very careful to look both ways when crossing the street for the rest of the week - all my luck has been used up. :)