Usually, when we are staying for more than a month in a country, where they have wide mobile phone coverage, we buy prepaid local sim cards.
However, in one of our phones I use to keep my Finnish sim card – just in case there would be some urgent message from our families back home.
Unfortunately, most of the calls I receive on this Finnish phone are telemarketing attempts, typically someone in Finland trying to sell me a subscription for a magazine or newspaper. The annoying thing with this is that my operator will charge me for the roaming fee: the part of the call that takes place outside of Finland, while the caller only pays the local fee!
When I discuss this subject with friends, I’m surprised that they often don’t share my opinion: “But the caller can’t know that the call will be redirected abroad!”
So what? say I. But I didn’t ask for the call either!
It would be technically very easy for the operator to play a prerecorded message, saying something like:
“This call will be redirected through an operator abroad. Additional charges may be incurred. If you want to proceed, push “1”, if not, please end the call.”
Sometimes we use the phones for more sensible tasks, like here when illustrating the size of some prawns.