No thanks, Telstra

I got a letter from Telstra a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, they were worried about how many calls I'd missed in December (17 of them!), so they were going to start a message bank on my line. It's free, they told me.

Well, that's very nice of them, but if I'd wanted message bank I would have got it already. It's not exactly a secret service. If someone can't get me at home, they'll probably call my mobile, or send an SMS; I don't need message bank. There was no question in the letter, though, I was getting it whether I liked it or not.

That got me thinking (always dangerous) why are they so insistent to push a 'free' service on me? The answer, I figured, was in their little graph explaining why I was getting it. I missed 17 calls in December, 10 in November. The cheek! Their network had been used 27 times in 2 months for NO payment! Someone tries to ring me at home, I'm not there, they don't pay. Next step is the caller's choice: try again later, try the mobile, etc.

So, when they turned my personal message bank on, on the first of March, the first thing I did was attempt to set the amount of time the phone will ring to the maximum to give people plenty of time to realise I'm not there and hang up. While I was listening to their interminable announcements I heard that you could actually cancel the service through their telephone set-up thing - they don't tell you that in their leaflets and promo letters. Even better, I thought.

After listening to another boring load of announcements, which I think might be so you fall asleep and miss where you have to hit the button, I managed to cancel the service - but only after confirming about a gazillion times that I really wanted to do this.

Bye bye message bank. Now I don't have a free service that I didn't want and people don't have to pay to find out I'm not home.