Simon Brew
Fed up with the growing cost of technology-based services, Simon Brew discovers that there is such a thing as a free lunch, and it’s called Skype.
I like things that are free. I do subscribe to the notion that there’s no such thing as a free lunch in principle, but that hasn’t stopped my one-man quest to disprove the notion over the past decades of my life.
My youth was (partly) spent ringing up for free catalogues, entering competitions that I always lost on the tiebreaker (‘Why do you want to win this?’ ‘Because then I wouldn’t have to pay for it, silly’), and engaging in a one-man hunt for gift horses, whose mouth I then never even remotely stared in the direction of.
As I’ve got older, I’ve found myself far happier to pay for things, a phenomenon I never really thought I’d get to grips with in my infant years (that’s what 25p a week pocket money does for you). But I appreciate it’s right and proper that if someone has spent time and effort working on something, then I don’t have a right to tea leaf it. That said, I recently read a story of one IT magazine editor – not our beloved Nik, I should hasten to add – who admitted to stealing sweeties from his local shop in his youth. This is a well-to-do man, too, who I’m wagering got more pocket money than me. Yet that didn’t stop the young cad from slipping a packet of Fruit Polos in his coat pocket. Fruit Polos! At the very least go for the Fizzy Chewits, man! That’s where the action is. The late, great Woolworths even used to sell them in bulk packs. But I digress.
While I have little quarrel with paying a price for good-quality products, I’m getting increasingly bothered at the cost of many technology-related services. A text message, for instance, has such a miniscule ‘manufacture’ cost that I begrudge even spitting a penny in the direction of my mobile phone operator for the dubious pleasure of sending one (given that said operator’s staff may well have sold my details, too, I figure it owes me money if anything). Likewise, I’ve had a letter from Sky telling me the price of my telly is going up. Why? As far as I can make out, the quality of the 2384 channels it offers hasn’t improved, and it still only offers a 10-minute limit on previews of, er, the ‘arthouse’ programmes it transmits late at night. Why should it have an extra pound of my cash? But then we, as a society, tend to cough up easily for things like this, thanks to the modern-day accomplice of big corporations, direct debit.
Last month, though, I began a very belated fight back. At long last, I discovered Skype. I say discovered. This wasn’t some Indiana Jones-esque quest that had me moving a Chocolate Orange slightly from one side of my desk to the other to uncover a new cavern under the piles of papers. This was me refusing to pay the bill for an hour-long phone call to Los Angeles. I’d like, at this stage, to tell you that this phone call was to a major international talent agent, who was primed to pluck me from deepest Dudley and transport me to the glitz of Tinseltown, but that would be a lie, and quite a big one. I’m happy for you to think it’s true, though. I’ll be in Heat magazine at this rate.
Nonetheless, a phone call I had to make, and the thought of saving a good tenner or two was enough to have me signing up. I borrowed a fairly clunky USB microphone and speaker combo that had been reluctantly formed into the shape of a phone, downloaded the software and bravely ventured forward. I daringly clicked on a phone number in my email client, and waited for the phone to call a friend’s UK landline to test it. It was as if the technology fairies has danced across my keyboard and sprinkled magic money-saving dust onto it. I completed a call, only interrupted by two instant messenger messages sounding their arrival, and a web pop-up making the kind of noises that I suspect the person on the other end of the line didn’t want to hear. I learnt valuable lessons about closing windows here, friends, let me tell you that right now.
Then it was time for the big call to Los Angeles. I’m not used to technology working first time, so Skype utterly caught me off guard when a chirpy American voice greeted me. ‘Have you got video switched on?’, the person on the other end of the phone asked. No I haven’t, you nosey fecker, I thought. I have to hold some values in this new technological world, and reserving the right to not wear a shirt when I’m on the phone, while sneaking in mouthfuls of Toblerone, is one I intend to preserve. But Skype is a technology of potentially world-changing genius. The irony, of course, is that because it’s free, nobody wants to pay to promote the thing. As such, the child in us who gladly grabs anything free they can find is happy to ignore a genuine gift horse when it turns up and stares lovingly in our direction. I’m guessing if said gift horse offered the adult population Fruit Polos en masse for free, there’d be a very different reaction. I can think of at least one satisfied customer straightaway.
