I thought over this thread during the night and want to write something about people helping people. This is going to be long, and harsh. But it's not personal. It's for everyone to learn.

First, technology is scary for people, even though it shouldn't be. But when people need help they have no idea that information is the most important thing they give to anyone trying to help.

What I see most of the times is for some new user come around and say "help please" then go on a rant saying how bad the telco is. It may sound familiar in this case, it is.

They then go on getting irritated with all our questions and turns. It makes no sense for them.

What they don't realise is that we have no information to work on. In this case we were told that:

- 2degrees wasn't helping solving a problem (rant)
- Vodafone was the problem (assumption)
- There was a Vodafone SIM involved (wrong information).

In the first post we were not told if steps were taken to see if this was a problem on the sender's side.

We were not told Vodafone wasn't involved at all, except for a display on the handset, so an assumption was made by the user.

We were not told that he had an overseas SIM that showed the same behaviour. We were told it was a Vodafone SIM when in fact it was not.

So it's easy to see two highly skilled technicians (Johnr from Vodafone and SaltyNZ from 2degrees) wasting their free time during a weekend before Christmas and trying to help someone that was not giving us any valuable information.

The time wasted in this discussion is gigantic. For everyone.

There's a reason why we recommend people to make detailed posts when asking for help. Help here is provided for free, but our crystal ball is broken.

We'd love to see everyone happy after visiting Geekzone. Many are and even come back to give to the community by helping others.

So my request here is that PLEASE DO NOT POST IN THIS THREAD AGAIN. This is now something that only the OP and SaltyNZ should be discussing. Not even JohnR needs to be involved anymore.

I am locking this discussion and I recommend philnz847 to contact SaltyNZ directly via PM here on Geekzone to see how to proceed.