Telus What You Have For Brains

 So before I go to sleep I click on the YouTube video of hockey highlights from last night's Canucks game and I get, "DAVE AND ADAM'S IS THE LARGEST DEALER OF SPORTS CARDS AND UNOPENED BOXES IN THE WORLD..." at 3 or 4 times the volume of what I was trying to watch. It comes with the message, "Video will play after ads." I hit refresh before I hear the entire Dave and Adam's spiel. Another ad comes on with the message, "Ad will end in 5 seconds." I guess I can wait fi ---" "DAVE AND ADAM'S IS THE LARGEST DEALER OF SPORTS CARDS AND UNOPENED BOXES IN THE WORLD!!!!" Of course! "Ad will end" doesn't mean it won't be followed by ANOTHER ad. In fact it usually means it WILL on today's YouTube. So I keep hitting refresh. I see the first five seconds of about 20 ads because, of course, you can't refresh until you've seen at least 5 seconds of an ad for whatever YouTube's data mining team has discovered you might be interested in buying. FINALLY after 5 minutes of retail shitfuckery I can watch the 3-minute video I was trying to watch! Except at the 2 and a half minute mark, "DAVE AND ADAM'S IS THE LARGEST DEALER OF SPORTS CARDS AND UNOPENED BOXES IN THE WORLD!!!!!!!!" This is punishment for skipping 20 ads and I am pretty sure the volume is now TEN times louder than the video I was trying to watch. I just end the video. I know what the score was and I've seen half the highlights. Fuck YouTube! I'm not listening to another ad! So I turn off my phone and I swear on the fake degrees of Steve Jobs I hear, "DAVE AND ADAM'S IS THE LARGEST DEALER OF SPORTS CARDS AND UNOPENED BOXES IN THE WORLD!!!!!!!" I am not kidding! I'm exaggerating but only a little. My phone sometimes someHOW comes back to life after I shut it off and it's always with a YouTube ad! 

We've all been through some or all of this. Some of you do what YouTube Chinese water tortures you into doing and buy ad-free YouTube but is it worth it? What does it cost 11.99 a month? You know what makes this another in a long line-up of examples of capitalism run amok in North America? You pay $102.00 a month for internet. So you pay 102 mafuckers a month so you can pay 12 sumbitches a month to not get ads on YouTube! I'm sorry when I talk about THIS kind of chicanery I can't use the word "dollars" because it seems much dirtier than that. For one hundred and two shitpubes a month we should be getting exactly ZERO ads on YouTube. We ALL know this to be true. Telus should be called "Sellus." They aren't DOing anything for all the customers that are forced to buy internet from them (or from Rogers but they're collaborating to suck up Bell and Shaw and price fixing together because of their illegal monopoly the government allows them to have on something we all NEED (don't quote me on this. Maybe Bell is doing better than I think. Maybe there's a secret internet provider. Who knows the level of scumbaggery they've stooped to?)). 

All I know is these companies always have HUGE buildings in downtown areas of Canadian cities. Do you know what Telus does to buy these big phallic skyscrapers? They flip a switch, that's what they do. I know there is infrastructure, but they don't give you any tangible product. In fact the only work they do now that they've got their lines in every home in Canada is make sure nobody in Canada can mess with their signal blocking. So really what we are buying from Telus is their hard work BLOCKING TV and internet signals we'd all have for free if they didn't block them. And this is not even counting the "in-ap purchases" like YouTube ad blocking that you can spend your hard-earned buttfuckers on to stretch Telus' signal jamming cocksucker for them. 

Have you ever lined all that assholery up in your head and thought about it? Really thought about it? Well here's another little tidbit to add to the lineup: They pay 34 bucks a month in the UK and in the Sudan it's $2.30 a month. Then again it's $383.79 in Barundi. How can there be such a range? It's the Emperor's new clothes. They are selling air to us. Do you know how they come up with prices for internet? They pull them out of their asses. I wish I was kidding but it's true! They just "determine" what it should cost for the wholesalers, that's right, there are wholesalers. Why? Because EVERYTHING has to have a middleman nowadays. Job creation! These superfluous wholesalers or ISP's (internet service providers) get internet cheaper than us then add a "reasonable" markup and sell it to the monopolies like Telus, who adds ANOTHER "reasonable" markup before selling it to us. But not for long. Telus/Rogers is buying up all the ISP's too. Seems that's the only way to get rid of the superfluous middlemen in business.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "If only there was a way I could block the world's air supply, become an ASP (air service provider), pull a price for air out of my ass - and it'd be pretty expensive with all the people running out and dying - sell it at a "reasonable" markup to some monopoly-holding air company in Canada like "Canadair" or "Maple Leaf Breathing Inc." "Then maybe someday they'll buy me out. Yeah THEN I'd be on Easy Street!"

Well these fuckholes DID IT! And the CRTC allowed them! That's the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. Well, I'm absolutely positive they didn't just "allow" them. The CRTC individual politicians who blather about their dedication to assuring Canadians have access to the best internet in the world at "fair and reasonable" prices are MODEL politicians! They probably use the same logic that a former Bell bigwig did when he wrote an article stating that Canadians have cheap internet because we use the lowest percentage of our income to buy it. They sell us that shit while being well paid by the telecommunication giants and probably the ISP's as well. The CRTC is nothing more than a subsidiary of Telus/Rogers if you want to use business lingo. 

Have you ever seen Vacation? Well if you haven't:

We all musta got manure for our brains! Chevy Chase is us, the desperate customer paying for something we absolutely must have. The ISP's and Telus/Rogers are the mechanics. We COULD ask these Shylocks what the CRTC thinks of their business practices but they ARE the CRTC. And that's how things work in a cuntry that has allowed capitalism to get off the rails. 

It seems to me that Canada used to be a place where you could get a fair deal from somebody even if they could see you really needed what you were purchasing. Maybe I just had too much manure on the brain back then. Here's what happened to me when I bought Telus internet for my place in Trail:

I went to the Telus office just down the street from me and tried to get hooked up there. One of their employees worked with me as a security guard at Teck and he was going to do it for me. But I went there right after work and for some reason I forgot some information and couldn't complete the application. But when I got home I got a call from the Philippines from some friendly sounding gal named Miranda working at a call center selling Telus to people with manure for brains like me. The very first thing I did, and I needed to interrupt her spiel to do so, was ask if this was a long term plan because I was only interested in month to month payment. I didn't know what I'd be doing two months down the road let alone two years. She assured me it was month to month. Then she went on about how we could get a home phone for free and the monthly rate was fairly decent (although much higher than Korea and lower speed but they say that's because of Korea being a small country - now I KNOW that's bullshit) and we could bundle it with this and that and get a special cash back offer applied to our first month's bill and yada yada yada. I told her I'd have to get back to her after I talked to my roommate Fred about it. He agreed and we were told it would be hooked up on Thursday.

Thursday was the first day of my online master's. So, like Clarke W. Griswold needed repairs at the garage, I NEEDED internet. The internet has become an essential service in our world and I don't think it should be hawked by Filipinas in call centers in Manila. Thursday rolled around - no internet. Not even a call from Miranda explaining why. My favourite play of Shakespeare's is the Tempest so I had a soft spot for Miranda. I also like the orange pop they have in the Philippines that bears the name. How could she leave me hanging like this? 

Whatever. I had to get internet so I went to the Telus shop, bought a used router and got hooked up to month to month internet. The deal was not as sweet but I had to get started with the course. The next day Miranda called. I told her what had happened and she gave me some shit about "switches" that needed to be dealt with. She also slipped up and mentioned that the offer was for two years. I said she had told me it wasn't and she mealy mouthed about how I would PAY month to month and that's what she had said, not that it wasn't a two-year contract. Also if there was a "switch" issue, why the fuck had they just left me waiting for hook-up the whole day? They KNEW I needed it that day because I had told them about the course and Miranda had guaranteed me hookup on Thursday. She tried to backpedal out of THAT too and I told her she was getting a bad report. The sales tactics she used are dishonest and discourteous. 

I used the modem and paid month to month while in Trail. When I left I returned the modem and asked them to disconnect me. I was told that they couldn't do it at the office. Why? They had hooked me up. Nope. "No reason, we just can't do it from here." I call bullshit again because I found out the reason. It has to be done online where they make it as hard as Bell made it to cancel their service. I have tried online, I've tried calling, I've tried replying to their calls to hook me up again, (I am SURE at least one of those calls was from Miranda too!) and it seems impossible to cancel my Telus service. I got a bill a month and a half after cancelling and moving and it said if the bill is not paid by such and such a time, my service would be cancelled. Okay, I'll do it THAT way I suppose. Well now I've received ANOTHER bill from them. This is two months after cancelling and a month after they said they'd cut my service! But they can get away with this because why? That's right, they are a government sanctioned monopoly and they can do whatever the fuck they want!

Why do ANY of us do business with Telus? Oh yeah, because we have manure for brains. I forgot. I have manure for brains. We all do I guess. Why else would they think THIS would work?

First of all, I get it!!! They're talking about washing dishes! It sure sounded like sex. Boy that's clever and original! Almost as original as sarcasm! You know like when you say something was funny but it really wasn't? Or when you overexplain something everybody definitely knows? 

Second of all, a dishwasher uses LESS water? LESS??? Oh that's supposed to be a joke too. OOOHH 

Yes! They are serious! They are flogging dishwashers as water saving devices! I mean I've seen a lot of people, including some of my family who stand at a sink and have the water running while washing one dish at a time. They'll go to the fridge leaving the water running. Get a beverage. Maybe a snack... I lived with my grandmother for a year and she did the dishes in a tub in the sink. All the dishes in one tub. Then when the dishes were done she emptied the tub of dishwater onto her flowers. Nowadays we just leave water running for the background noise but STILL do they think we're THAT DUMB? Do they think we have manure for brains? Well, we ARE watching their ad on TV or internet so...