When MTN's love went bad

By Kalungi Kabuye

It started with a text message that came in early one morning. It read, in part, that MTN had given me trial of a caller tune, but I didn’t pay it much attention (at 6am and just out of bed, I had more important things to address), but when I checked later it had disappeared, so I forgot about it.

Two hours later a friend calls me, and after saying hello said she never knew I was a fan of a one Mpologoma, a singer. No I wasn’t, and who is he? It’s a she, my friend said, and you have her song as a caller tune. I remembered the text I had received that morning and tried to search for it, but it was not there.

That whole day everybody who called me said something about the caller tune, so I decided to call my own phone and see what the fuss was all about. And it was there, the most God awful tune I had ever heard (for the record, I have nothing against Ms Mpologoma).

I’m not an MTN hater, far from it. I know MTN has been called all kinds of names, and there are facebook pages and groups dedicated to just bashing the company, but I’m not part of them. I’m a loyal kind of guy, and when MTN launched their services in 1998 I got my number and have never changed it since then, 14 years down the road.

I made many friends who were working with MTN, those early days when they were extending their coverage to the country. People like Aggrey Kagonyera, Phillip Besiimire, Erik Van Veen, Sheila Kangwagye, Tina Byaruhanga and many more became life long friends and colleagues.

For all those reasons I’ve stayed loyal to MTN, even when it seems the whole country is cursing them. But of late my loyalty is being stretched almost to the limit, and here is why.

First, there is this thing called CUG (Caller user group), where subscribers can call each other for free, for a certain fee a month. It was introduced in our company about two years ago, but after some time I opted out because it was not working for me. 90% of all the calls I make are to people outside the company, and there is always the intercom if I needed to speak to a work mate.

So I instructed MTN to take me off the CUG network. I called everybody I knew and went to several customer service centres, and eventually got to around to a guy named Dennis. After several e-mails and un-returned calls, I was removed from the CUG, but the next month I was put back on.

We get air time credited automatically, but every month when I got the airtime, I was back on the CUG. I would then try to get Dennis to get me off, which on average took about a week or more. This went no for more than a year where every month I would be trying to get Dennis to work out things.  Funny but when he was on leave it would take just one e-mail and a day.  Guess Dennis is a busy man, with little time to deal with the likes of me.

Eventually I got permanently removed from that CUG list, but Dennis needed to be reminded every month to load my (and a few others) air time separately, and eventually he decided he didn’t want to deal with me but with our IT department. So every last week of the month our IT guy sends an e-mail to Dennis to load my airtime for the coming month. I don’t know what the process is but it would take two weeks on the average.

Lately there is a new twist, because I get less airtime than I’m entitled to. This month that nice guy Dennis only loaded about 25% of what I was supposed to get, I have no idea why. So again our IT guy sent Dennis an e-mail to load the rest but by the time of writing this column nothing had happened yet. Told you Dennis was a busy man. Someone I narrated my story to said I must be a very patient person, that otherwise you don’t mess with a Ugandan and his air time.

Away from Dennis, I belong to a telephone ‘chat room’, where for sh220 you can send a message to all the people subscribed to it. For the last few months my messages do not get through, although sh220 is deducted every single time.  I thought it was an SMS Media problem, and I bugged Simon Kaheru almost to death about it. But it seems to be a network problem. What really bugs is that my friends are very active on the chat, and I want to be too, but I can’t.

And there are always those bu-girls who ask for ‘me to you,’ it seems to take for ever, and when it eventually works turns out it has been done twice. Ever tried to ask for your airtime back?

So right now I’m not loving MTN very much, and then they send Mpologoma into my life, without notice, unsolicited, and definitely unwanted.

Finally, our IT guy says that Dennis is actually a nice guy if you meet him in a pub. Do I want to meet Dennis in a pub? I’m not sure, depends on what time it is, how many beers have gone down, and whether my full air time has been loaded or not.