Telephone talk
‘mericans remark when they come to our home the absence of telephone calls. This is not necessarily because people don’t like us, though I imagine that could play a role. Plus we answer the phone yelling “WHAT DO YOU WANT AGAIN?”. But I think the real reason is because you get to pay for every telephone call you make. Call neighbor: pay for it to the tune of about 5 cents a minute prime time (mpt). Call across the country and you pay 5 cents mpt. Call America and it’s about 10 cents mpt. Call America to someone’s cellular… same price. (Call the USA on weekends and pay $2.40 (total) for anything from 30 minutes to an hour… the same price. I called Mom recently and talked 30 minutes and 40 seconds. I got the 40 seconds for free.)
Call from your Swiss land-line to a Swiss mobile and pay 4 to 5 times what it costs to call the USA. Needless to say, when people give us their mobile numbers we just laugh. They really think we’re going to call them for that price? I mean, we’re not THAT close.
There’s like a 12 hour period where you can call people (on weekdays). It’s between 9 and 9. Call later, and you have to excuse yourself ten times. Really. Call before, and it’s about the same thing, even though there’s a law that all Swiss have to be out of bed by 6:45. Unless they were up late the night before on the phone… to America.
posted by Brady @ 8:10 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Good thing James Taylor wasn't Swiss. Otherwise his hit song, "You've Got a Friend" might have gone like this:
"You just yell out my name"
And you know, wherever I am,
If I can hear you,
I'll come running
to see you again.
Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you've got to do is yell really loud,
And I'll be there,
yeah yes I'll be there if I can hear you.
Because I can't afford these "dad-gum" (James was a southern boy) Swiss phone charges,
Like Brady, you've got a friend
haqzsmka (an act one performs on self after altering a James Taylor song)
You've chosen to live in a place that mandates the time you are to get out of bed?
You've told me of some other off the wall laws. You should do a blog on all the interesting aspects of Swiss law.
dampjzb (Swiss PJ police knocks loudly on your door and yells "Get out of your dampjzbrady)
Europe is weird.
wow! Living in America for two years has caused me to forget that no phone calls are free...even local! Thanks for reminding me! Although, I have chosen the prepaid plan for my cellphone here (i've had to get used to not calling it GSM), so I do sort of have that idea of "every phone call costs me money...even local, only cellphone"....but I tend to make local calls on the landline phone. Honestly, it blew my mind when I first found out local phone calls were free. When they first told me, I thought it was a campus thing and somehow the school got this one huge bill for everyone's local calls and paid for it, to be nice I guess.....I've learned that schools dont do that.
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