“Katie, you really need to learn to ditch the sitch” – Alana McMullen
“Here, you should just use my phone” – Graham Clark
“I would not wish Safaricom on my worst enemy” – Katie Dergousoff
People in Canada whine and moan over how overpriced and shady all
of the cell phone providers are. But I swear I will never ever ever again
complain about Rogers or Telus or Shaw Cable as long as I live under my parents
roof. Nothing is as horrible as Safaricom.
How naïve I was, that first day when I flew into Nairobi airport
and saw the Safaricom sign – cheap calls to Canada! Four shillings a call! Five
cents! Wow, waaaaaay cheaper than Rogers could ever dream to be! And wow,
Graham had gotten us a Safaricom UBS rocket stick! Internet at Kaguya, so key.
No. No. No. Katie from last week. Don’t do it.
My Safaricom SIM card cannot hold connection for more than ten
minutes, IF it can even find reception in the house (which is about once a day,
with two bars if I am particularly lucky). Texting is a particularly fun
adventure, as it can take up to half an hour of resending a message before it
goes through, then up to four hours to receive a message back (tried and true.)
The internet stick is even more comical. No website has ever been
developed for third world country internet. Not joking, it has probably taken
about fifteen minutes just to publish this post. The Facebook homepage can
load, and if I am lucky I can see my notifications before it crashes and
refuses to load for another twenty four hours. Gmail loads on the html view,
but pray to the lord that you can open an email or send an attachment. Uploading
a single picture takes more than an hour, but I am not too sure as my patience
ran out shortly after that and I threw the stick across the room.
However, I will give the acceleration and braking on the stick
credit, as the kilobytes per second tend to fluctuate like so:
0 kb/s, 400kb/s, 2.345 kb/s, 0 kb/s, 30kb/s, 999999999999kb/s, 0
kb/s, .03 kb/s, 3 kb/s
Safaricom is the bane of my existence.
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