Translation: Hi there,

It's your good buddies at Optus here.

Your thank you gift is waiting.

No, it's not a Triple Zero emergency service that doesn't go offline when you need an ambulance.

And no, it's not fair compensation for that time we had a nationwide outage and managed to not just take out your phone and internet, but also half of the national economy.

And no, it's not yet another free subscription to that bloody soccer streaming service. We finally took the hint and shut that down.

No, this time an AI subscription service is looking to deceive its investors by pumping up its paid subscriber numbers.

So we took a bucket of money from them in exchange for spamming our customers with a text message.

You know the deal. 12 months free. You won't get charged if you remember to cancel before the deal expires and then make it through all their dark patterns.

We know we can get away with it because we're one third of one of Australia's big corporate oligopolies.

I mean, what are you going to do? Chances are the whole reason you switched to us is because you were pissed off at Telstra.

And your only other choice is TPG/Voda/iiNet/WestNet/Internode/Lebara/TransACT/Crazy John's/Neighbourhood Cable... (it's all one conglomerate with awful mobile coverage now).

#Optus #perplexityassistant #perplexityai #perplexity #ausbiz #AI #enshittification #business #oligopoly
@aj AI companies are grasping at straws because they know the reckoning is coming.

@aj Jesus fucking Christ. This is a slap in the face. Here, we'll give you $300 worth of stuff you never asked for.

Optus just had two outages in my area inside of one week ('unexpected equipment failure'). So far I've stuck with Optus because where I lived until April, I couldn't even get service from Telstra (they did not recognise the street address, which led to a boondoggle once when I tried to order a prepaid SIM from them), and Vodafone was crap.

But I think it's time for me to port my number out. I'm seriously starting to get annoyed with Optus, and I've been with them since 2012. I was directly impacted by their data breach and had to get a new driver's license too.

@aj Things is, I just looked. With Telstra I pay a lot more more and get a lot less (I need international calls). With Vodafone I *could* get a better price but do I trust them enough?
@aj Fuck me, nothing could communicate more clearly, "Hello, we are rich pricks who are completely living in a bubble and have no fucking idea what average people care about or need."