I don’t have a phone line. I’ve never needed one, and at the current rate, it almost looks like I’m not going to get one, either.

I’ve been using 3G all this time, mostly because of its zero-installation nature. It works great, but after a few months of intensive usage, the modem’s starting throw little fits. It’ll just drop and die with no reason, reject the SIM card, and occasionally tell the PC its connected when, in fact, its not. Frustrating when you’re waiting on a download…

So today I sort of decided to “stuff it”, call Telkom, and sort out a phone line. In a sick twist of humor, their 10219 call center isn’t toll-free, which meant that I was talking (from my cellphone) on borrowed time.

Went sort of OK, they figured out that my residence was indeed in an area with phone lines (ie, in the middle of a suburb), and we went through the details process. Name, surname, residence, ID number, credit check all OK, order confirmed as analog residential line, I’d have to pay a deposit, no problem, sir, your order reference number is 1, 2, 6, BEEP.

Bye bye Telkom. So I hung up and waited for them to call back. Nothing. About ten minutes later I logged on to FNB, reloaded my phone, and placed a call to Neotel (since their online ordering system was offline).

Full marks for customer service on that one, even though we spent the first 25 minutes of the call trying to figure out exactly where on the coverage map I was. Neotel, upgrade that thing? Sweet.

Eventually we confirmed that yes, excellent coverage on NeoConnect Lite (which basically gets me a phone with SMS functions and a really, really slow modem). No problem there - slow is a “guaranteed” 156kbps line, which when it comes right down to it, is 3 times cheaper than 3G, and would be prone to those all-day all-night constantly-downloading routines.

Credit check? Just a second … no, sorry, you don’t clear.

That’s the part that sort of confused me. Telkom had no problem, but then again, they were huge and slow and probably had internal blacklists for these things. So what now? Refer to an external credit agency, they’ll check and call you back.

It’s been about 7 hours with no word from them, and I’ve been forced to return my 072 SIM to my modem - my 071 number apparently wasn’t accepted by their systems (err, right). Which means that when they find out I can actually afford R299/month (which, given the information I submitted, should be DUH obvious), they’ll have to email me - something I’m not particularly counting on.

Telkom didn’t call, though, and I’m sort of not expecting anything from Neotel - I just guessed they’d have sorted it out by now. And so I’m back to 3G. I don’t even want to know what the airtime cost of that meaningless venture was.

Did anyone bother to mention that it’s the 21st century? Just checking.