Another story in the many life episodes of things that seem to happen only to me. This one involves my brand new Motorola smartphone and the Maxis Hotlink SIM card I bought for it.

From the beginning, my state-of-the-art Motorola seemed to struggle with the Internet. Everyone around me in Kuala Lumpur is surfing the Internet on their phones with ease. They’re zipping from website to website effortlessly and watching YouTube videos and sending emails and a hundred other things. Meanwhile, I’m just staring at my screen as it refuses to load websites or does so at an agonizingly slow pace.

It was never a huge problem for me because I don’t use my phone to browse the web that much when I’m out in the city. I use Google Maps or Maps.Me and I take pictures. That’s it. I do all my web surfing when I’m back at my guest house and have wireless access. Still, it was annoying that my very expensive smartphone seemed to be a dud. Had I purchased the wrong phone? Were my settings screwed up? I did a ton of research but I couldn’t fix the problem.

In the meantime, I was facing the constant “screw you” that all of us poor consumers face when dealing with giant, greedy corporations. Maxis Hotlink – the local cell phone network provider – has a wonderful scheme for lining their pockets at my expense. They put a time limit on whatever credit you buy. If you don’t use it up, you lose it. The only way to keep the credit you already paid for is to keep buying more credit. It seems criminal to me, but all companies seem to be able to get away with policies like this that cheat consumers.

So even though I was barely able to access the Internet through my phone, I had to keep making the trek to the shops to buy more credit and top up my phone. The local Malaysian currency is called the ringgit. The policy is that you get one day validity per ringgit. So if you buy 7 ringgit in credit, you have to use it in 7 days. If you buy 30 ringgit worth of credit, you have to use it up within 30 days. If you don’t spend that credit, the company just takes it away and you have to buy more in order to use your phone.

So there I am unable to use my phone but constantly buying more credit. Today, I was up to 60 ringgit on my phone, and I was still unable to get on the Internet. I finally went to an official Maxis store. I wanted to ask them if they could check the settings on my phone. Maybe I had the wrong settings. Maybe that’s why my phone was so slow.

The woman takes my phone and looks at it, and she tells me, “You have no credit.”

I have no idea what to say. I’m flabbergasted. No credit? That’s impossible. All I do is troop down to the 7-11 and buy more credit. Maxis Hotlink forces me to buy credit all the time. I show the woman the setting on my phone that shows that I have built up 60 ringgit in credit.

And what does she tell me? She tells me that, yes, I purchased 60 ringgit worth of services from them. We can see that right on the Hotlink app on my phone. It says 60 ringgit credit right there in big numbers and letters at the top. But, she tells me, that’s just the first step. Now I have to actually take that credit and purchase Internet data through the app. It’s INSANELY complicated. You go into some menu and you have to purchase Internet access using your credit based on numbers of gigabytes per a set time period. So I can buy 2 gigabytes of data that lasts for the next 24 hours. Or I can buy 6 gigabytes of data that lasts for 7 days. And, of course, if I don’t use up all that data in that time period, I lose it and the money I used to purchase it. Or I can take advantage of their special “Social Media” packs where I get X amount of Facebook data and X amount of Twitter tweets and Instagram snapchats or whatever.

Then she tells me that even if I do all of this, I still can’t actually make a phone call or send a text message. To do that, I have to go into another menu system and purchase phone minutes that also draw on my banked credit. And this expires, too. My credit expires constantly. I have to keep buying more and more or they take away what I already paid for. And then I have to buy separate data packs with that credit, and those data packs have time limits. And then I have to buy phone call packs – and THOSE expire. Basically, I just have to give Maxis all the money I have in the world, and they can do whatever they want however they want.

That’s the way of the modern world, it seems. Everything is slanted against the average person and the normal consumer. We pay the price so the CEOs can add more and more millions of dollars to their retirement plans. Every company seems to have a policy that makes me pay fees. I keep wondering when I will be able to make a policy of my own? When I can charge fees?