EE Bah Con

I have been paying six pounds per month for my mobile phone ‘package’ this past year, which EE, my ‘provider’, doubled in October. I phoned up last week to cancel, receiving a PAC code in order to tranfer my number to another company which is cheaper. EE was not making any money out of me, the employee moaned, and it could no longer afford to charge me so little. For having received the code, I would cease to be their customer within 28 days. Within 90 minutes, however, someone from their ‘Retention Team’ called me, who decided that six pounds per month was a suitable deal for me after all, and would I be pleased to stay with them if I agreed to this and they doubled the amount of free mobile data each month? Perhaps they were still making some money from our relationship after all. To be fair, I would have agreed to pay more than six quid; EE is a nice company and I do not begrudge them a profit. Yet we both dealt with each other shrewdly: they were prepared to double my cost to test my willingness to walk away, and I was prepared to accept that outcome. So now the same amount is being paid and I have even more data, while they retain access to my bank account and I am not patronising their competitors. Astuteness on both parts, I think.  

At the start of Luke chapter 16, the Lord Jesus tells the parable of the unjust steward or shrewd manager, concluding:

And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

Whereas the Lord’s people ought to be innocent of evil and be governed by the highest ethical standards, we also ought to be ‘smart’ and wise for the times in which we live. People baptised in God’s Holy Spirit may still succumb to telephone fraud; people bound for heaven may still ill-manage their earthly allocations.

Be wise, therefore.

Image by Tobias Heine from Pixabay