Have you ever been in a desperate situation where you reeaally needed credit at like 2am in the morning? Okay, not everyone’s that nocturnal, but maybe you’ve experienced it a few times, running out of airtime at an hour or place that is really inconvenient.
Because I’m a night owl, I’m often doing some mission critical assignment online at 1am. On this particular occasion, I woke up and tried to connect to the internet. But I couldn’t. Glo’s internet service has a particularly annoying quirk — without at least some credit left on your SIM, your data plan will not connect. I was sure there was airtime on the SIM, but then I remembered that I’d stuck it in my phone earlier, and because of yet another silly Glo mobile internet quirk, the airtime, instead of the data subscription, had been used up when I did some light browsing earlier. I checked the balance, and sure enough, the credit was all gone, down to 0.00.
Damn.
So here I am at 2am in the morning, and I needed to do these mission critical assignments on the internet. All I needed was a measly 100 Naira credit to get the data plan working again, but obviously, there was nowhere I could buy it at the time of the night. The sparse 200MB data plan that I use on my phone is not even nearly enough for the kind of browsing I do on my PC. What to do? It was all I could do not to curse out loud and wake the neighbours.
Then it hit me. Buy credit online!
I hesitate to describe what should have been a no-brainer as an epiphany. It’s not like buying credit online is a new space-age invention that just came to Nigeria. But even now, I still find buying credit online to be a lot more trouble than it is to simply walk out into the street and purchase a scratch card from the nearest vendor. More disappointments than I care to count have made certain that the option would ordinarily not cross my mind in daytime. At 2am however, online airtime recharge sounded like a supercalifragilisticexpialadocious idea. The 200MB on my phone would not get me through the night, but at least it would last long enough for me to re-enable my dormant data plan.
So, now how to go about this? I don’t know if it’s just me, but like I said earlier, buying credit online in Nigeria is a discombobulating experience. There’s Interswitch’s Quickteller, which I’ve never gotten to work for me, no matter what I do. I used to recharge via Paga once upon a time, it was a really nifty thing to do, till for some strange reason, it just stopped working. After getting on a first-name basis with a couple of their support staff, mostly trying to resolve airtime recharge issues, I’d given up using the service for a while now.
On the off-chance that one of them might work this time, I tried both options again. I wasn’t very disappointed when they didn’t. I thought to myself — so what else is out there? That was when I remembered this obscure airtime recharge service called Top Up Genie. I only remembered it because they’re a startup that works out of the Co-Creation Hub, where I hang out often. I’d even tested the service on an earlier occasion, but their site was so full of user interface and experience bugs that I gave up without buying anything.
However, a desperate man can’t be finicky about the kinds of straws he will try to grasp, so I tried it again. This time, it worked with minimum fuss. A few minutes later, I’d re-enabled my data plan. Thanks to Top Up Genie, a disaster of galactic proportions had been averted. I could finally get on to the mission critical at hand, my midnight fix of Naruto. All was right with the world.
If you’re gonna try Top Up Genie, you should know a few things. You’ll have to register (obviously), and you’ll need an Interswitch compatible debit card (ask your bank if you’re not sure whether yours is).
Some cool things about this service. They don’t charge convenience fees on your airtime purchase, what you pay for is exactly what you get. You can recharge multiple phones at the same time. And you can even schedule recurring airtime purchases on your phone. The not so cool stuff — their user experience is still so freakin’ unintuitive and broken in so many places that if it wasn’t the middle of the night, I would have run downstairs to buy the damned airtime. Don’t let that discourage you though, check it out — www.topupgenie.com
Do you buy airtime online? If you have, I’d also like to hear about your experience, tell us where and what it was like.
