Recently I opted for substance over style when I retired my Virgin cell phone and replaced it with a no frills alternative from Petro Canada, a carrier with zero cachet among the arbiters of urban cool.

It’s been a couple of years since I reluctantly armed myself with a device designed to irritate everyone sitting within earshot of my riveting conversations on the GO bus or train, e.g. “I’m on the bus.” “I’ll be at Union in half an hour.” etc. This is hardly the stuff of Shakespearean soliloquies, but at 25 cents a minute prepaid I had bought the phone for purely practical reasons and not as an instrument of rambling discourse. 

My phone rarely rings. When it does, it’s either a family member or the Toronto Star trying to flog subscriptions. It even sounds pathetically like an old-fashioned phone, since I have no idea how to replace the boring ring tone with something that expresses the real me. The majority of my fellow passengers, on the other hand, create a spontaneous if discordant jam session with a musical smorgasbord ranging from rap to rock.

People often ask for my cell number, but there’s not much point in giving it to them since I only switch my phone on for about half an hour a month. The old phone had a ton of text messages on it which I never bothered to retrieve (the learning curve was beyond me) but which turned out to be perky notices from Virgin informing me that the amount of time my prepaid plan would cover was gradually but inexorably shrinking.

When Virgin made its splashy debut in Canada in 2005, a $15 top up expired in 90 days, a feature that was touted as one of the brand’s biggest selling points over stuffy, cheapskate corporate rivals. Then, to their horror, they found they were attracting not just the young and cool, but an alarming army of the demographically dispossessed (people of 50 plus) who tend to use their cell phones only when strictly necessary, since they are already paying for a land line with free local calls.

Not only was this audience hopelessly bad for the company’s image, but many of its members also spoke rarely and in brief spurts, and had no interest in browsing the web or texting until their thumbs wore out. This meant that courting them was a lousy long-term investment.

These days the $15 top up lasts a mere 30 days and Virgin, positioned by canny marketers as a subversive upstart, is now wholly owned by the suits at Ma Bell. The only reason I originally signed on, apart from the cool logo of course, was the low monthly output for airtime. Now I found myself up cell phone creek courtesy of the incredible shrinking prepaid plan.

Today I am the proud owner of a Petro Canada slide phone, with all sorts of options I will never use, along with a $25 prepaid plan that lasts an astonishing 120 days (as at the time of writing). And, so far at least, using it to talk to people as opposed to texting them is not a billable extra.

In theory I can even download free ring tones, although the choice is somewhat sparse. I decided against the only one I’d actually heard of, for fear it would come back to haunt me.

It was Madonna’s Like A Virgin. 

Categories: Columns, Vintage Whine
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