Depressed teens offered counsel via SMS

Link: allAfrica.com: South Africa: New SMS Initiative to Help Stop Teen Suicide.

"We have been continuously receiving SMSs even after hours. Our consultants are quite busy answering teens from across the country. The response has been amazing and better than what we expected," Ms Heather McAlpine of the organisation said.

I like it.  However, I have one problem services such as this: Ultimately text is a ridiculous medium for the application.  Pity help you, for example, if you’re a British teen paying 12.5 pence a message to exorcise your feelings. Just ten messages and you’ve racked up over a quid’s worth of expenditure. 

I’d really like to see the market make more of an effort with free shortcodes which have been muted for a while all over the place.  A troubled teen and the charity administering advice shouldn’t have to suffer because of operator stupidity.

When your clients start demanding free (to the end user) shortcodes as many of mine have, you know there’s a problem.  The clients are quite prepared to foot a reasonable bill to pay for the facility to offer a ‘free text line’ to their customers.  The industry should be way ahead of the requirement. 

Instead we’re all forced to do our best fake smile and look at the sky… wait a few awkward seconds… then hope the client forgot the question… anything to avoid having to copy the idiot in the old IBM spinning logo advert who has to confess, "errr… we don’t now how to do that…"