Cells Receipt

I brought an old disused cell phone up here from L.A. because I found out that to get a Canadian credit card and build Canadian credit, you have to show a utility bill with your Canadian residence address as well as your ID.

This is a problem, because our landlord is including the utilities in our rent, so we don’t get the bills.

Canadian credit card companies will accept a phone bill in lieu of a utility bill though, even if it’s a cell phone—go figure how that works as proof of a residence address, but not my house/not my rulebook.

So I thought, I’ll keep my regular phone but bring this old phone, fire it up with a cheapie Québec SIM card, get a bill in my name at the residence address, problem solved.

But non.

Because cheapie cell plans don’t send you a bill. They don’t even provide an electronic one online (I’ve been through three cheapie cell companies now, so I know). They don’t show your address in your online account—even though they require it to sign up—so you can’t dummy up a bill either. Sometimes, they don’t even send the SIM card after you’ve paid a premium for it (happened twice, bastards).

I discovered some of the reasons cheapie cell services were so cheap. One company which shall remain nameless but sounds exactly like FIZZ, has no customer service number, no customer service email address, only a chat interface with a bot that delays your ability to chat with humans by asking frustratingly irrelevant questions and forcing you to give incorrect multiple choice answers.

Your only other option to get to a real person is to have *other users* answer your questions on Fizz’s gamified community bulletin board.

That’s it. Srsly. Other users. I’m sure the kiddies think this is great.

They’ll learn.

The second cheapie credit card company (Public Mobile) was even worse. Same thing happened: paid for a SIM card, ten days later it still hadn’t arrived. Same chatbot but NO chathumans at all, just the bot. Same user-community racket, but you can’t even sign into their community to ask questions if you don’t have an account number, which they never gave you because you weren’t issued a phone number, because the SIM card they claimed to have sent you never arrived, even though you paid for it up front, and they didn’t bother with a tracking number, and oh yeah, there’s no way to cancel your account unless you already have an account.

Literally. No One. You. Can. Call. Text. Chat. Or. Email. I tried.

At least Fizz’s human chat representatives were able to issue a refund in a fairly timely way (after hours of pounding through irrelevant chatbot questions). With Public Mobile, I spent days in evil circular online limbo trying to cancel and/or get my money back. I eventually just asked my credit card company for a chargeback, since there was no other message I could send. They did so immediately and without question, so I assume this happens with Public Mobile a lot.

I found a third cheapie company (Lucky Mobile—three’s a charm!) and they have live humans you can talk and work with on account problems, and they are quite nice, but they don’t provide the utility-bill-with-residence-address I need either.

So now I have to switch providers *again* and hope they’ll bill me. Never thought I’d ever say that about a cell phone carrier, but that’s what being in Canada has done to me.

Why did I put myself through this multiple SIM-switching nightmare? Because I needed a Québec SIM fast in addition to a utility bill (and because our landlord offered a sign-up link and he’s been super-great, so I wanted him to get the referral credits).

Speed was needed because the Québec government refuses contact you about government business unless you provide them with a Canadian phone number—things like administering your mandatory French proficiency test for placement in the government-sponsored French classes they want all non-francophone immigrants to take.**

**I won’t go into how the QC government provides all the informational and registration materials for these French classes to people who don’t speak any French solely in French.They do this utterly unironically. Go French or go home, it seems they are saying, in untranslated French.

Anyway, I hate cell phones but I now have two, a cheapie Québec SIM card phone and my phone with my L.A. digital life in it. I am reduced to taking out my frustration by inflicting upon you photos like this one:

I’ll let you know if I ever get that Canadian credit card. Not holding my breath.