ufone is the worst company ever

not something U could be proud of

you’d think that competition might bring some quality and over all service of the companies anywhere.

that has not happened in the cell phone companies in Pakistan. their prices have gone down, but their services have gone down too.

consider Ufone. i wanted to change my service to Zong, since the signals of Ufone are very weak in the area that i live in. and that is where my nightmare started.

I went to the Zong center and asked them to port my number out to their service. they sent in a request and Ufone came with a reply that there was a name issue with the request. meaning that the name and number did not match.

I called UFone customer service and asked them what was the problem. there was no problem. my name details were correct. just in case i asked them what name was written down in their records. and carefully wrote it down. and then once again went to the Zong center. and made a Mobile Number Portability (MNP) request.

this time it was rejected again. apparently i had some outstanding balance due, on a PrePaid account. so i called the Ufone customer service. they said they did not have a clue as to why that happened. they asked me to go to their service center.

so i went to their service center. and they filed the complaint. and later that evening they called me again and said that the issue had been resolved and that i should file my request again with Zong.

so i filed my request again. Ufone called me to know why i was switching. and i told them i was doing it because of the poor reception in the area. they filed my complaint, and send me a complaint number. and told me that my number will be ported out the next day.

and when the next day arrived, guess what happened? they have again rejected my request. the reason: the name mismatch issue.

What dumb people.

the shock doctrine

I have started reading the shock doctrine by Naomi Klein. so far an interesting read. I will write more about it when i have read it in full. The Washington Consensus and The Chicago School have always been one of my favorite subjects to read about.

making this country a land without music

so we hear that the dancing girl of Lahore have gone on a strike.

no country for dancing girls

Lahore is a culture rich city, and has been like that for centuries. the old Heera Mandi ( named after a sikh called Heera Singh, though literally it translates into diamond market) had been where the old “tawaif” or dancing girls culture was flourishing. the princes in the old days were sent to these dancers because not only were these people skilled at dancing, they could also talk in a refined, most elegant way. thus what came to be known as the “baazari talk” (specifically, talking in the most crude way. very close to dirty talk) is a misleading term. after all, these people talked in the most elegant way, with all the care taken about how to address people. it was gentleman’s talk in short.
the Heera Mandi still retains some of those aspects. if you go there, you will find women who dance and sing for a fee. and many of them have licenses. some, however, went into prostitution, sullying the name of the Heera mandi.
Ziaul Haq ( that man whose marks on our society would probably never be washed completely)  thought that in order to appease the ultra-religious people, it was best to ban some activities. he banned dancing on television. and most of his policies had a negative impact on the dancers. famous Kathak (classical) dancers left the country. but his banning did not do good to the society. the prostitutes used to be in one particular area in Lahore. now, thanks to his policies, they are ubiquitous.
I have related this history precisely because in morality government policies seldom work. and is counter-productive. when the MMA or the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal came into power, it banned all such cultural activies in the NWFP. Eqbal Ahmed had called Afghanistan “a land without music“; precisely that was what the MMA wanted the NWFP to become. however, they were beaten by Technology. what the people could not watch in a live theater, they started watching on CDs. and those artists got a new breath of life in the form of those CDs. again the failure of government in things related to morality.
now what i can not understand is why something that is acceptable on film is certainly unacceptable live?( perhaps the same thing could be argued against the ban on prostitution in the united states, because porn is just paid sex on film). I must say that the quality of theater has gone down in pakistan, because all these theaters contain are naked jokes, ill written scripts and dances. and i have criticized their quality. but, still, it is not the government’s job to ban them. that should reside with the populace. and as we have seen, given the thriving nature of those theaters, it does not seem like the populace would like to get it banned.

Mobilink’s laughable SMS fever

one thing about the Pakistani cellualar companies is for sure. they act in every way possible to make sure that they could take the money out of the customers’ pockets without giving them any services. the new so called SMS fever by mobilink is one more step in that direction.

when one hears of the service one thinks that it will be available to message to all the companies. that is not the case. the message quota is only applicable towards messages sent to the mobilink numbers. and since that is written in fine print hardly visible to anyone people get trapped into it.

I was one of the victims of. i had first thought of subscribing to the 100 rupees one, but since you are always skeptic of any deal coming out of the pakistani companies, i subscribed to the minimum one. and thank god i was saved.

I did call them and told them that even prostitues did not make money the way they were making it.

and to all those who are thinking of subscribing to the service, please dont. its not worth it. buy a new sim from Uphone or some other company. atleast in those packages messages could be sent to all the other networks.

mobile companies in pakistan rip consumers

first of you had to pay for the pathetic service, if you could call it a service. now you can not even complain about it to their customer service department, if you can call it that too.

apparently due to the overwhelming amount of callers the mobile phone companies in pakistan have found a new way of milking their consumers. they have started charging their consumers for the so called customer service.

Mobilink, the largest carrier, was the first one to start jazzing up their customers. they have started charging their customers 75 paisas for each call made to their customer service department. how could the others miss the opportunity? so Warid also started charging their consumers 50 paisas for each call to their customer service department. Uphone will start it charging their customers from tomorrow.

who said competition is not good. it is good, but not for the consumers in pakistan.

some more about PTCL

last year i bought a PTCL wireless phone. it worked great. then i moved and i wanted to change the number. the customer service people told me that i could get it done at their office but when i went there no one would do that for me. they told me that it had a different frequency and stuff. in short they wanted me to buy a new phone. given that they were offering reimbursing the money in the form of balance i bought a new phone.

but that is where my misery started. I had bought it solely to connect to internet. and it did not work in that respect. i was so pissed off. i called them several times. I got all the lies they could tell me. finally one of the customer service representative told me that the service was not ON in that area. and that what the other people had earlier told me were all lies. I thanked him for being so honest.  after that i had to just use that balance up by calling anyone i knew since it was only valid for three months. I bought a worldcall phone and it worked fine in that area.

I have seen that their new service of broadband has not been a good start either. they have been advertising it but the customer feedback has been aweful. and that makes me wonder if people would even want to trust them? we had heard that after privatisation it would become better. instead it has worsened.

PTCL broadband:is it worth it?

lately i had been thinking of getting a broadband connection for myself. I have heard that PTCL has started its braodband services but i am still not sure whether i should take it or not. the reason is obvious: PTCL is not reliable.

I have taken services from PTCL before. and they are not a good service provides in any sense. I used their wireless service in the past and it was good for some time. later when i moved to another city and tried their service there, it did not work. they would not take back the wireless phone. and they wont correct the service. in short i wasted two thousand rupees for nothing. they kept telling me lies on top of that; that I needed an external antenna, that it was a minor glitch and it would be corrected soon.

so I am scared to get into a contract with them for the next year or so not knowing what i would get. I would love to get comments from people who have used their service and let me know about their experiences.