What happened to my $20 discount?

The whole world knows that I bought a new phone. (Well, if you aren't already aware of it, that is because you weren't paying attention. That information is public knowledge.)

The plan that I signed up for was the Optus $85 My Plan Plus with a $20 discount per month for the entirety of the 24-month contract period.

How postpaid works in Australia is different to what the word mean. You have to pay the minimum amount (in my case, that should be $65) in arrears, and if you go above that minimum amount (eg: you used more than 7GB data or made international calls exceeding the 300-minute allowance etc.), the extra amount will be charged in the next billing cycle. You get a few days to actually make the payment, but the bill is "generally" generated at the beginning of the billing cycle.

And last night, I received my first bill for the new plan. I signed up for the plan on the 18th.

And it stated that I had to pay $85!!! There was no mention of the $20 discount.

Buying digitally downloadable game titles from Amazon store when you are not in US

Few days ago, D4R (that’s his nickname btw), a guy I know from Gamer.lk and Facebook posted on Facebook about an Amazon deal for Max Payne 3. The game was on sale for just $14.99. We all know that Max Payne 3 came out only a few months ago and $15 price tag was too good to be true. The regular price is $39.99 on Steam.

I don't like 3rd person shooters that much, so naturally I didn't have much interested in buying this particular game. But there was an interesting thing about this post. Both D4 and I don't live in the US. Amazon don't sell these outside of US either. But he was telling me that if I used a US postal address as the billing address, I would be fine.

I wanted to try it out, you know, because it might come in handy some day. For example, Crysis 3 is being sold for a really high price here in Japan, and if I can grab it off Amazon (especially off a deal), I believe the price will be much reasonable. I was planning to preorder it when I visited Sri Lanka last December, but unfortunately EA does not let people pre-order AAA titles on the Indian EA Store anymore because the pricing is about 1/3 compared to US pricing.

Anyways, back on the topic. I had an Amazon account that I had made few years back but it didn’t have an address nor a credit card. First, I made my password (much) stronger, because I was going to add sensitive information. Then I added my Japanese VISA credit card and then I added a US address. Well, it is not exactly a US address. It’s part Japanese and part US. They only check for the state and the zip code. I made the mistake of adding a New York address. That would add a consumption tax to your grand total.

Basically skip the following states: CA (California), KS (Kansas), KY (Kentucky), ND (North Dakota), NY (New York), PA (Pennsylvania), TX (Texas) and WA (Washington).

This is the title I bought. I am posting a screenshot in case the link doesn’t work.