It`s a new year and we all deserve i gift, i`ve got a greeting from my cell company - Pele-phone. It was neither a card nor a call, it was a press release that the company will raise the price for some of it`s users in about 2-2.5% rate. Sounds a bit wrong in a country with zero inflation and in a year that VAT was lowered. I`ve decided to give them a call and find out if my account will be affected. It was, as a very nice representative explained i will have to pay more 2%. When i`ve asked how much is 2% i was told, after a 5 minutes on hold it will be 5 agorot (Israeli cents) a minute. I was paying 41 agorot so 5 of them is not a 2% of a sum, however the representative insisted it was only 2%. Strange, i knew i was pretty good at math so my sanity took a pretty hard blow, i was so sure that math is universal language but it appeared that my cell company managed to create it`s own dialect. In any case i wanted to know what have i done to deserve such a generous present and i`ve asked the sweet representative that question. The answer was simple and a bit sharp - "We can raise the prices as we see fit, it is in your contract".
Contract or not it shows just how much we need competition in the market and major force in that market should be educated consumer.
Naor ( Feodor ) Weissmann