Pass the message

Too late the hero — that’s what telecommunication companies were during the holiday season. Much like firemen who arrive when the building has already burned to the ground, phone companies’ texting promos came right on time to bid the holidays goodbye.

Unlimited texting services are back, after being unavailable for much of the Yuletide season. That’s great! Now I can send super-belated holiday greetings to my friends.

For many texters who wanted to send Christmas and New Year wishes to relatives, friends, acquaintances and pretty much everybody listed in their phonebooks, unlimited texting is a godsend. Fifty, 100, 300 messages sent for the price of only 20.

So, it was quite a blow when the many requests for the promo were not processed. In the days leading up to Dec. 25, an unlimited texting confirmation was a great gift, which, unfortunately, not many received.

The situation stayed the same in the days between Christmas and New Year.

Frustrated texters turned to Facebook for their greetings, and also to air their complaints. A Facebook group for people annoyed with the telcos’ holiday services was created, and now it has more than 7,000 members. Sure this was during Christmas break, but it doesn’t seem right that money-saving services like these should be on break, too!

Christmas and New Year is the one or two weeks out of the 365 days of the year that are supposedly a season for giving and goodwill. The only thing these companies gave their users is grief.

The scapegoat for this issue is system overload. Is that our problem? All of the telco companies know that thousands, maybe even millions of text messages are going to be sent on those important dates and they didn’t bulk up their system to accommodate the heavier traffic. They offer these promos when their systems cannot handle them.

Instead of finding a way to fix the overload problem, they decided to deny providing any of the text promo services. Sometimes, even regular texts are difficult to send because the system is too slow. Right, that’s the best way to deal with the issue — put the burden on the consumers.

 Pissed off, I refused to text anyone at all on Christmas and New Year. I and many other Internet generation babies flooded Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all those other social networking sites with greetings instead. It is a good alternative to texting, but there are people in this world who don’t have a Facebook account.

Millions of text messages costing up to one peso each were still sent during that holiday period. I guess it’s a bigger haul than thousands of 20-peso promo requests.

And now, the text services are back because the lines are not clogged up anymore. Right — just in time for the next holiday.

Telecommunication companies are in good company with these kinds of Christmas schemes. So many businesses and corporations are jacking up prices right when the “ber” months come around.

A Christmas fanatic friend of mine believes that all shopping must be done 50 days before the 25th because, according to him, prices are inflated 300 percent by that time.

It seems like a modern-day version of A Christmas Carol with Ebeneezer Scrooge. This time around, Scrooge has turned into corporations whose epiphany came just before, well, Epiphany. Sadly, there was no turkey for us poor Tiny Tims.

So much for good service providers. So much for the spirit of giving (well, I guess we are giving to greedy businessmen).

A new year, a new decade is here. Change is right around the corner, too — just a few months away.

We get the leaders we deserve, so if we don’t want corrupt politicians at the wheel again, it’s high time to change our greedy habits. It’s never too late — not for Happy New Year greetings on the first day of class, and certainly not for changing bad practices.