Cheap international phone calls
My first job after leaving university was to develop a billing system for cheap international phone calls. I was in a development team of... one. Just me. Fresh out of university with no experience of programming in the real world. I could rant on and on about exactly how bad the company was but that's an answer for a different QotW. Perhaps I should get to the point.

The billing system allowed our customers to manage all sorts of international phone call methods (call shops, phone cards, NetMeeting), allowing different rates to be applied to different phone lines for all destinations. The real push was in phone cards - which was where the real rip off came in.

When I learned of the requirements I had to develop I felt pretty sick. I have a good friend in Australia and back in the day I'd buy phone cards to call her up from time to time. I shall pass on what I had to do.

* Most people know of the connection charge. These have to be advertised in the small print. The call connects and you get stung with 20p - sometimes more.

* Next comes the billing period. For example you will be billed for every 6 seconds you use. Make a 1 second call, be billed for 6.

* After that we have an expiry date. Cards will expire 30 days after first use. Fair enough, I guess - but if you still have some money left...

* Lastly we have the biggest swindle. They vary the number of seconds in a minute. Some of our customers would set the number as low as 40 seconds in a minute. One of their customers would call somewhere like Sylhet on a promise of 45 minutes for the fiver the parted with for the card. They'd get 20 minutes.

This was calculated was in a big Oracle stored procedure which would return two values. The first was the amount of time the person had for a phone call, the second was the amount of time we'd tell them they had. The difference could be huge.

We had a support line with an answer phone. It was always fun to come in in the morning to find 6 new messages full of colourful insults that our customers didn't have to hear - until the day when the office shut and I was working without pay because the Americans didn't want to bail us out anymore for making a loss.

In conclusion. Don't buy phone cards. They rip you off something chronic.
(Rilux might be pregnant and has bum-aids, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:58, Reply)