To every phone company: fuck you.

I started getting pissed about this a while back when I heard about "expiring minutes." If you didn't use something that you paid for, you would just get it taken away by the person that sold it to you. They turned making phone calls into a sort of option buying exercise with expiration. It's one of those ridiculous things that I can't comprehend people accepting, but since a critical number did every other company followed suit.

So I'm in Korea. I only need to use Skype when I'm in Korea, since it allows me to call the US for 2 cents per minute. A while back I put $12 on there and it's been lasting me ever since. I still had $8.41 cents left last time I checked, and now that I'm in Korea I tried to make a call to the US. My balance was zero. I checked my history, and they decided to expire my balance in February. Apparently there is a policy that your money is only good for... a year and 6 days after a currency exchange? It's either that, or 16 months and 22 days after you put it in there.

I'm not mad about the money. I'm mad about the inconvenience. I effectively paid about 4 times as much as they advertise since I had the rest of my money arbitrarily stolen from me, but it's still cheaper than the phone companies for international calls. Since I'm in a foreign country, they won't even let me add money with a credit card so I had to inconvenience a friend to send me money on paypal.

Like, I didn't buy minutes from Skype. I deposited money with them for future use, allowing them to garner whatever interest that money allowed them to get instead of leaving it in my own accounts. It's only 8 fucking dollars, but it's the principle. I'm back to realizing that every single phone company is a piece of shit run by con artists. Don't even get me started on charging for SMS.