Time to blog regularly / No such thing as Freephone

I'm back! So perhaps it has something to do with getting an iPhone (always have something to distract myself with) or perhaps it has to do with getting a job and suddenly valuing my "free" time differently but either way I have been anything but consistent at blogging. So I have just set a weekly reminder (in my iphone) in the hopes that I can compose something worth your time to read at least that often.

Life in the UK, or London more specifically is something that is easy to write about from the perspective of what is interesting or unique from an American's view? Today's topic is "Freephone". In the USA if you dial 1-800 or 1-866 or probably any 1-8XX it would not cost you anything; they call them "toll-free" in the US. In the UK the long list of "non-geographic" numbers (084, 085, 08X) is quite tricky to wade thru the cost structure. They started out mostly as "Freephone" but if you call from a cell phone they charge you and sometimes it's only free if calling from a landline operated by a specific company (BT) and the table to look up which prefixes will cost you what on which mobile phone plan is guaranteed to give you a headache. Oh, and if you really want someone to express your anger at call a 084 number. Seriously, they are paid to take it. One could actually come up with a business plan to build a lousy product/service and then offer a 084 support line as a revenue generator. It is NOT Freephone for anybody and the cost of the call is split between the phone company and the owner of the number (Yes, this means they earn money from your call, and putting you on hold, and so on so long as you remain on the line). In principle, I do everything I can to avoid companies that list 084 numbers because they should not punish me for needing to talk to them. Get my money from sales not product inquiries.

After thinking about this more I don't mind so much that I have to pay to call "Freephone" numbers from my cell as I realize they would have been deducted from my minutes in the USA if calling from a mobile. But in the US even receiving a call costs me minutes so I don't think so much about it and tended to have a higher alotment of minutes in my line so that it wasn't such a big deal. In the UK the call initiator pays and all received calls are free assuming you aren't roaming. Roaming is another tricky thing because I had a nationwide plan in the US and my phone probably wouldn't work outside of the US. In the UK you can be in a different country two hours from central London and suddenly the cost of using your mobile phone quadruples. Each country in Europe means either buying a new sim card or paying roaming if you want to use your phone. Since received calls are free it can often be cheaper for a traveller to just get the new country's sim card and pass the number on to friends/relatives so you can receive their calls for free and have just enough credit to make emergency calls. I now have sim cards from Ireland, UK, France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain. Now that I get to travel with my wife more frequently it actually is simpler to just pay roaming and mostly text message each other while outside the UK than to source a local sim (resulting in roughly the same cost as well). Particularly simpler since they tend to cancel your old funds/card if you don't use it for a couple months. (Buying a new sim card is much easier than figuring out if your old sim card still works/can be reactivated when communicating across a language barrier).

So in conclusion there is no such thing as a free lunch or Freephone.