This spring I got totally fed up with my MTS mobile phone plan. I am paying about 50 Dollars a month, without even using the phone once. It proves almost impossible to get ahold of  a service representative on the phone and when you do, you wish you hadn’t, because they are unhelpful, uninformed and often downright rude. After having expierienced what Europeans pay and the kind of service they get with their mobile phones, I thought it was time to change. So I went to the Rogers Store at Cross Roads in Winnipeg.

I must have picked a very inconvenient time, as I had to wait for the two service reps to each serve another customer. With my luck that took each of them almost a 3 quarter hour. But I am the one who picks the line at the safeway where the cash registrar breaks down just before it is my turn – or the person before me has twenty items that aren’t priced correctly. So, I won’t hold that against Rogers. When the sales rep did finally have time for me he was extreemly helpful and polite. He took his time to try to satisfy my specific needs.

Well, the pricing for Rogers mobile phone services is a lot cheaper than MTS and I liked the phone they were offering with their plan. It wasn’t the iPhone of course, but it was a top of the line Nokia. What I also liked alot was the fact that the technology used enables me to switch the SIM card in the phone and use a different mobile phone provider when I am in Europe. They also told me that the Rogers phone services would work in Europe, but admitted that the roaming costs would kill me. One thing I just cannot understand though, is why in Canada we have to pay extra for every little thing that Europeans consider to be part of a standard mobile phone package – such as ‘caller-id display‘, ‘call forwarding‘, ‘voice mail‘, etc. In Europe nobody would accept a mobile plan where you have to pay for incoming calls either. I guess in Canada mobile phone providers just try to get as much out of their customers as they can. And Canadian customers just seem to ‘suck it up‘. I guess we just need more and better competition in Canada.

I had the pen in hand and was about to sign the two year contract with Rogers. There was just this one small problem of finding a phone number for me. – Well I’ll bore you again and tell you about Europe. There, you can take along your phone number from one provider to the other.- I knew that wouldn’t work and didn’t really care. I could contact the few people  who have my cell phone number and tell them to change it.

Well the Rogers sales rep kept asking me where Hillside Beach was and what the next major town was. I told him it is close to Victoria Beach, Grand Beach, Traverse Bay, Pine Falls, Powerview even. None of these towns showed up on his screen when he was trying to find a number. It turns out I could have a Selkirk number, a Beausejour number, or a Gimli number. As usual our little resort paradise does not exist for the major companies. – Well I did some calculating and was almost ready to take one of those numbers, realising I would almost always be paying long distance charges, but then I also realised that everyone that called me would be paying the same. No, that wouldn’t do. I thanked the Rogers sales rep for his time and said I would have to give it some more thought.

Well here I am still with an MTS phone plan called Holy Cow. I didn’t even want something fancy from Rogers like the new iPhone! All I wanted was to take them up on their offer of better and cheaper phone services. They don’t have them! At least not for us out here at the Lake.


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