I’m not worried about cellphone radiation.

It’s the service providers that are giving me brain cancer.

If stories of spectacular service schadenfreude satiate you, then settle in. Why yes, I do tend towards the hyperbolic if it means achieving the always acceptable ambition of alliteration. Anyway:

As I prepare for my abroad, one of the things I would very much enjoy having is basic cellphone coverage. Just enough to make or receive a few calls in whatever country I happen to be at the time, supplemented by a gigabyte or so of data that I may abuse for the glory of my soon to be personal lord and savior; Google Maps.

So I called the international services line of Verizon - my current service provider - to explain my European intentions and ask what services, if any, were available to facilitate it. After performing the standard ritual of negotiating the highly advanced and intelligent automated directory system (bred from the very pits of hell), being put through to the wrong department, asked for security information, redirected, asked for security information again, redirected a second time to a dead phone number, yelling angrily at the highly advanced directory system, being put through to the wrong department once agin, and being transferred through to the (presumably) correct person who was out to lunch; I was promptly connected to a real live human who was even willing to answer questions.

The resulting conversation was a delightful one in which I was told in no uncertain terms that Verizon did not offer any international services, but did have a solution for customers going abroad: Verizon had partnerships with a handful of European providers and would provide a discount with one of them if I wanted to pick up one of their plans while traveling. This would have the added benefit of keeping my American phone plan running at a heavily reduced cost, meaning I could still make and receive calls Stateside as per normal.

This was both sensible and useful. I should have been immediately suspicious.

Upon calling Verizon's international service line a couple days later to green-light the plan, (sacrificing a goat as substitute to dealing with the automated system) I received a very different story. This time I was told that Verizon in fact holds no partnerships with any European carriers. I would have to buy a brand new plan with a foreign carrier if I wanted any coverage, and I would not be able to access or use any Verizon services while abroad. Additionally there was no such "reduced price" option, nor would I be able to put my plan on hold the duration of my travels. I would need to pay my full monthly bill or pay hundreds in early termination fees to close it while abroad, even temporarily. How wonderful.

I had the sneaking suspicion that I might get a third answer if I called a third time, so I hung up and called back; low and behold I was right. This time I was told that Verizon does indeed have an international plan for customers (contradicting both previous claims), but that it would add forty bucks to my monthly bill, not offer coverage in most of Europe, and only provide 200mb of data each month. However just incase that value proposition didn't totally knock my socks off, it was possible to temporarily deactivate my account for a few months without incurring either monthly expenses or early termination fees. Not great, but not terrible either. This time I made sure to write down the name of the agent I was speaking to, employee ID, and call center location. This way I'd have more than a simple "But I was told...!" the next time the story inevitably changed on me.

So! Verizon's a no-go. Surely there are plenty of European cell services out there with great tourist deals to be had. Turns out, that is exactly the problem. There are LOTS of European cell services out there, and all of them seem to have oddly fragmented geographical coverage. Some services only cover the UK, others cover only Europe and not the UK, Spain or Italy, and others still seem only to cover random provinces in an incomplete patchwork. It seems that the world of European cell towers is not run by a small handful of omnipresent players but rather by a chaotic swarm of independent operations. The only service I could find that had coverage where I wanted to go came from Eurail. Even so, they charge the maximum they're legally allowed to: ~$.20 per minute or megabyte used. Good enough for a traveller not planning to make many calls.

We live today in a digital world, where the infrastructure to access infinite information is globally available and readily accessible. Even so, a paper map out performs every satellite system known to man because of nutters service design. Miracles of science and engineering kneecapped at the final hurdle.

/rant