“Hello and welcome to MTN, your call will be recorded for
training purposes. For Twi, press one, for Ga, press two, bla, bla, bla….” And
the pre-recorded voice trails off unless otherwise, but I doubt if they do retrieve
and playback those back-up tapes for the said training or they just are
learning other things I’m not privy to.
Undoubtedly, MTN is one of the biggest Telecommunication
Companies who has fallen sub-par the giant status they carry about and as the
best when it comes to provision of Telecommunication services. It’s rightfully
so, because it looks like, they have shifted their focus from their core
objective of up-time and reliable provision of services to sponsoring of
programmes and provision of corporate social responsibilities.
The lady in question made me look stupid for subscribing to
their network. Her actions, depicted by the way she interacted with me also
gave me the impression that I could stop subscribing to their network if I like
and still there would be millions of Ghanaians who will patronize them. And,
all I could ask myself after that dead-end call for help was to ask myself why
I was still hooked on to their grid. I felt the need to stop using any services
that had to do with telecom services, but, you know what that meant. I was
going to severe ties with friends and family since there would be no form of
communication, neither would I be able to publish this post. I would be perpetually
out of coverage area and you can imagine how I would fare.
While pondering over the series of the appalling services
these Telcos provide us, I came to the conclusion that we as a clientele base
contributes to the shambolic services these service providers in tend provides
us. We don’t take our part of the various contracts seriously, which is why
these companies always have a field day.
Modern dispensation has made it imperative for us as a
people to continually go into contracts we are not even aware of, which
unfortunately have legal bindings on us. These contracts if explored to the letter
and the clauses thereof can get us into serious troubles our families cannot
even redeem us from.
If you have a presence on social media, be it Twitter,
Whatsapp, Facebook, Picasa, Tumblr, Foursquare, Instagram and what have you,
then chances are that, you have entered into a contract with a third party
application provider just by installing the application, which is usually free
of charge. As to if there are embedded
costs and how this companies fare, would be another topic for later discussion.
How many of us take our time to actually read the License
Agreements that comes with these soft wares? How do you know your rights and responsibilities
that come with installation of these applications? How do you know your
responsibilities with regards to the liabilities therein, should something
happen? How can you even sue these
companies when all you did was to just click ‘next’, ‘next’ and then ‘finish’
to get your application running?
Somewhere in 2004, I managed to read the License Agreement
that comes with Microsoft Windows operating systems, specifically that of
Windows98 during one of my installation sessions to the very end, even though
it was not making sense. I had to because I figured it was not there for its
own sake. It’s purpose-driven and for a reason.
Usually, these contracts state at the bottom of the License
Agreements that “You are now aware of your rights. Click next to continue” and I
ask, are we not allowing ourselves to be led to the slaughter house by just
consenting to these agreements without knowing what they entail?
All these contracts and transactions have terms and
conditions applying to them and it is what we should be looking out for, to see
for ourselves what will be in stock for us should we validate such contracts to
full blown statuses.
Our ignorance about these terms and conditions that applies
also accounts for the reason why some people win raffles but are not able to
redeem their prizes. These companies know most of us will not have the time to
read this supposed ‘chaff’ and this only plays advantageously to their gallery.
They sure know that you will be found wanting when the day of reckoning comes,
so beware.
We have to take some of these things seriously so that
customer service personnel of service provider companies should not feel like
they are doing us a favor since they would have known that we have actually
read and understood the terms and conditions that applies, thus our rights!
