This is more like a Facebook status update, but for the last three days I am trying to figure out O2 Telefónica CZ and their marketing. In particular this:

In order for them to agree to my accepting their offer to upgrade my son from pay-as-you-go mobile service to 24 months prepaid contract offered only to six to 26 year olds, they require:

• a photocopy of his Birth Certificate
• a photocopy of both sides of my ID (the second side contains my son´s birthday date again, as does the certificate)
• the number of my driving licence (?? any guesses ??)

Funnily the contract is called

O2 [:kůl:]

Kůl is cool transcribed phonnetically into Czech.

I wonder what is cool about providing a photocopy of someone´s Birth Certificate and TWO other documents before one can start using this cool feature?

I wonder what is cool about requiring parents to have a driving licence. If I did not have a driving licence, would this offer be not available? So is it in fact an offer fo six to 26 years old whose at least one parent has a driving licence?

I wonder what is cool about waiting 13 days to get any meaningful response/reaction to a request from O2?

Obviously the O2 marketing plays with English word cool, which transcribed to Czech phonetically is “kůl”. Kůl has its own meaning in Czech: a pole, a picket, a stake. The most famous quote in Czech language with the word kůl in it are the words by the last pre-revolution Communist Party boss Milouš Jakeš. He said to a meeting of party apparatchiks: “I feel alone like pole in a fence.”

Nothing the 6 to 26 year olds O2 are aiming at would know or remember.

Well it is all a game, I presume.

——

Addendum on March 23: After a month the “cool” tariff from 02 still did not work. My son is now a happy customer of T-Mobile Czech. Cool.

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Tags: Bureaucracy, Gadgets, Hard to believe, Mobile Phones, O2