{"id":2241,"date":"2013-05-29T09:35:06","date_gmt":"2013-05-29T15:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=2241"},"modified":"2013-05-29T14:19:54","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T20:19:54","slug":"a-free-25-gift-you-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=2241","title":{"rendered":"A free $25 gift you say?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I just got an email from my phone service provider.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not going to name names, but they operate as virtual monopolies whether you live in the US or Canada, so they&#8217;re all about as horrible and I despise them all about as much.\u00a0 Except Telus.\u00a0 Fuck Telus.\u00a0 I hate them the most.\u00a0 And it wasn&#8217;t Telus because I will never deal with Telus again.<\/p>\n<p>But anyway, I got an email from them offering me a free gift with a $25 value just because they&#8217;re such nice people and just because I&#8217;m such a great customer.\u00a0 So I googled a bit to see if this was a scam.\u00a0 Someone could be trying to phish for me data, you know.<\/p>\n<p>But as it happens, it&#8217;s legit.\u00a0 And also as it happens, the &#8220;gifts&#8221; are all not exactly worth much.\u00a0 In fact, they&#8217;re really just promotions to try to get me to buy more services from them.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a list of the &#8220;gifts&#8221;.\u00a0 I get to choose one:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a $25 promotion for the &#8220;Shopping Channel&#8221;.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t watch TV.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve never even heard of the Shopping Channel.\u00a0 I fear for the future of Humanity to know that the Shopping Channel even exists.\u00a0 The days ahead will be dark for our world.<\/li>\n<li>a 3 or 6 month magazine subscription.\u00a0 Magazines?\u00a0 What year is this?!<\/li>\n<li>3 months of 1.5GB\/month free for signing up to a more expensive data plan.\u00a0 Uh&#8230; no.<\/li>\n<li>unlimited texting within the US for July.\u00a0 I live in Canada.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t intend to travel to the US in July.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I was expecting something at least useful, you know, like a decorative set of pens or something.\u00a0 Don&#8217;t these telcos have enough of our fucking money already?\u00a0 This kind of insulting bullshit &#8211; along with the high prices I pay for not much service &#8211; would normally be enough to switch to a cheaper and better competitor.\u00a0 But they&#8217;re all the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I just got an email from my phone service provider.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not going to name names, but they operate as virtual monopolies whether you live in the US or Canada, so they&#8217;re all about as horrible and I despise them all about as much.\u00a0 Except Telus.\u00a0 Fuck Telus.\u00a0 I hate them the most.\u00a0 And [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[468,466,465,467],"class_list":["post-2241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-monopolies","tag-phone-companies","tag-telcos","tag-wireless"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2241"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2243,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions\/2243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}