What's Up Now, Etisalat?!

Alicia here. I finally got myself hooked up with Yahoo voice, which means a lot of you can start expecting annoying phone calls soon. For the last six months, I've been enslaved to the monopolistic telephonic services company Etisalat due to lack of market competition, which charges me some kind of outrageous rate to call the United States. (I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.71 a minute or something). My modus operandi thus far has been to send a mysterious two second ring to the person I'm trying to reach, click off before they pick up, and then cross my fingers and hope they realize it was me and call me back by way of a competitive, affordable US-based communications service. You can imagine I just haven't spoken all that often with the folks back home. Well, this little dance, while fun, is now over - the miracle of PC-based calling is now connecting me to my friends and enemies for a mere 1 US cent per minute. That's right - the same currency I use to loosen flathead screws and see exactly how long an object has to fall to reach the bottom of this 16-story tower can buy me a full minute of talk-time. This morning I left my mom on hold while I went and answered my doorbell just to spite Etisalat, actually. They've still got one on me, though - I can't get a technician to come out and move my internet connection from one room to another over the phone. I have to visit their office in person and apply for "internal shifting." Grr.