An open letter to MTN

Dear MTN,

Recently I trudged through the plains of Mordor, chucked the Ring into the Mount Doom and emerged in one piece on the other side. Which is to say that I’ve just crossed my self-payment gap and Discovery will actually start to pay for things again.

This is just as well for you, because it means that my therapy bills will go to them and not to you, although if there were any justice in this world, you would be the ones coughing up.

A couple of weeks ago I ran a blogging campaign; some of the material appeared here on Thought Leader. This involved travelling down to Cape Town, then uploading brand and advertising-related content as well as updating my status and tweeting. Fairly basic stuff, but for it to work, access is critical. When you’re blogging a road trip for a client, you care in a fairly deep and meaningful way about the ability to upload content. To do this, you need 3G that works, most of the time.

And this is what I discovered: your 3G service is diabolically, spectacularly dreadful. I was disappointed not to be able to tweet while driving in the Karoo, but I accept that we can’t have 3G access everywhere. Still, even when I was in the middle of Cape Town, I might as well have been in the middle of nowhere. I’d find myself at 2am, desperately trying to upload blog entries, praying that when I clicked “save” they’d, well, save, only to see them vanish into the ether.

It was virtually impossible for me to do my job. Do you know how stressful that is? Do you know what it’s like to be reduced to a weeping mess in the middle of the night because you desperately need to sleep and you desperately need to get stuff done, and you can’t do either because you can’t get a !@#$%^& signal??

There’s a scene in the first Yebo Gogo which appeared in 1994, where the Yuppie holds up his cellphone because he can’t find a signal. Who would have thought that 17 years later, I’d be having exactly the same problem?

I don’t expect you to do anything about it. I just thought you should know.

Sincerely,
Sarah