edcrain.com

So Telstra is getting meaner and meaner. The miserly little 'sebastians' in the top of the management heirachy have now decided to stop the use of the Telstra payment card we use at post offices. This can only be due to the fact that a fee is charged for the service the post office provides. Telstra obviously does not want to pay for the cards either.

Yet these same miserly buggers charge us to call them and ask how much our bill is so that we can pay it, and being mobile for years as many of us are, means we have no way to get the bill in time (and many of us don't have access to a computer) as the paper bill can not be constantly changed. In many cases we cannot be sure where we will be.

Think about this, they are so bloody lousy they don't want to provide customers an easy and convenient way to pay their phone bill, yet at the same time want to charge people to call in to 125111 and find out how much their bill is --- how lousy and mean is that? Remember; it was a free call some years ago! Would you walk into a shop that continually asked you to pay 25 cents every time you wanted to know how much something costs? How miserly can Telstra get?

Sure, I could do what they might want and give them card details just to take what they want every month, but who would trust any business -especially grasping profiteers like Telstra - with open access to take money as they like. More so since Telstra want us to get a sumarised bill without all the details of calls etc, which I understand is on their agenda.

If we could get the coverage from other providers we would not go near Telstra and they know it. That is why they fight so hard to keep the monopoly on the use of the cells across the country.

Telstra is a classic example of privatisation, --- bullying customers when they have no choice, bullying their workers to coerse them out of being in their union and so isolating them and weakening their bargaining power, ripping off customers in the bush who can not do much about it, and trying to bully governments to do just what they (Telstra) want.

Remember, many of us are hundreds of kilometres from a town and some small places have no more in town than a post office agency type of thing, if that, so to go to a town with an internet den or the like is possibly a hundreds of km round-trip just to pay a bill if we can't pay in a P.O.

Come on Telstra, get rid of these over paid sub-normal-awareness geeks out of the top etchelon and get real --- you once were an Australian operation when you were the PMG and Telecom, now you are something alien and foreign to the spirit of Australia. Telstra is one of the most unAustralian, most grasping companies in esistance today. A company who is so profit oriented it has forgotten (deliberately forgotten ie doesn't care) about the whole idea of a fair go and demands everybody fit into their exceedingly limited view of what things should be.

Privatisation is an absolute curse. It has ruined our national communication system, rail and tram services and so many other what once were services to the people of this country. In this case, Australia, especially rural and remote Australia, is something Telstra does not seem to be able to understand at all; and we can thank that gutless 'turncoat Barnaby' and his mongrel National Party for allowing that final bit of the scurrulous sale of Telstra. He should have taken advice from Bob Katter and left the Nats standing as an independent on his own merrits.

As far as understanding how people feel, especially people in remote and rural areas, --- well, put it this way --- "Telstra couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the directions were wrote on the sole"

Perhaps this needs to be raised with the P.M. to see if they are willing to renationalise Telstra without any compensation at all, they have had more than their fair share already.