We convinced ourselves that we could get away with the $70 package, plus an additional data pack, which would double the allowance from 150MB to 300MB per month for a total of $89 per month. For that, we’d pay only an additional $179 for a 16GB iPhone over a two-year contract.

We should have been focusing on the call allowance, rather than the price of the iPhone and the data pack. The $60 phone plan we’d signed up for wouldn’t cover our typical calling pattern. The flag fall for each call was 27c, and each 30 second block would chew up another 28c — nowhere near the $49 monthly Next G cap of $200 in calls, plus $50 Telstra mobile calls, despite its 37c flag fall and 40c per 30 seconds.

The magnitude of our error began to sink in only after we’d realised that the media’s concentration on this device’s internet capabilities has tended to obscure the fact that it makes voice and texting operations so much simpler than the average smart phone. Once you get one into your hands you begin to understand what a true communications device it is, and you find yourself placing more calls and sending more SMS messages ... to say nothing of the iTunes AppsStore.

Financially, however, it looked like we were sunk. That was the point at which Bleeding Edge’s impossible optimism kicked in. Why not ring Telstra and ask them to change the plan? All we had to do was to convince Telstra to overlook that contract we’d signed.

It was Monday morning when we rang 125 111, and asked for the iPhone department. The customer service agent listened to our proposition, and told us that he’d put us through to someone who could help.

Our past experiences with Telstra has taught us to translate that as putting us through to someone who wouldn’t help. This time, we were surprised to find ourselves talking to someone who asked us for details of our complaint.

We explained that we hadn’t made a complaint, and we were rather hoping that we wouldn’t have to. We had been a customer of Telstra Mobile since its establishment and we could see no reason at all why Telstra would want to offend us.

He agreed, and explained that we’d been put through the wrong department. His department dealt with escalated complaints, but he’d put us through to the customer loyalty department.

The customer loyalty person didn’t sound very promising. This would be a problem, he mused, because we’d have to pay a termination fee of $979. And then there was the matter of having bought the phone from an independent, rather than a Telstra shop. “They have their own avenues of dealing with these issues,” he said.

Nevertheless, what he could do was put us on a $79 capped plan of $79 ($450 calls a month plus $100 calls to Telstra mobiles at 35c per 30 seconds) and drop our data pack back to $10 for 150MB per month. In four days we’d used no mobile data, because we’d been using wi-fi.

It was a much better deal for us, and it suggested that Telstra might possibly have discovered that treating its customers well was a better strategy than screwing them to a deal. Could the iPhone be improving their communications too?