At the best of times I don’t consider myself someone that suffers fools – today I was held to be the fool.
I decided to “quickly” pop past the Cresta Vodashop to buy a new BlackBerry Curve 8520 as an after-hours support phone for the Neology support team. After taking one look at the apparently labour/time intensive process to actually get a business contract out of Vodacom (one would think it’s easier to give suppliers money) I opted to go with a Pay-As-You-Go option.
Buying the phone was a quick and painless experience and I ended up with a lurid white phone – hopefully this won’t get left at home or at a client – its hard to miss 😉
Since the Vodashop didn’t have any Starter packs I headed to Game to pay the required 99c and get my RICA done – only to be told that the RICA system is offline.
I head back to Vodashop — they try doing RICA and tell me that they’ve been offline for 2 days… Now I have a brand new phone; brand new SIM; but no way to get services on it –FAIL.
The run-around to get a phone activated is simply not justified or worth the effort. I realise RICA’s attempt to match citizens with cellular numbers has positive/useful applications (granted, mostly in the context of big brother but I digress) but unless they make it bulletproof it should not be enforced.
Let us hope this outage is related to them making the systems fool proof….
/me prepares to head to the Vodashop again sometime tomorrow……