Fresh from their resounding victory in the National Reform Council over the calculation of mobile phone fees, the guardians of consumer rights are turning their sights onto other blatantly unfair pricing strategies by large corporations.  Such practices threaten national economic stability, exacerbate income inequality and imperil civilization as the Bangkok middle class knows it.

The phone rights crusaders started from the assumption that the mobile phone companies have completely wasted the millions they spend on advertising and so none of their subscribers has ever heard of a special promotion.  They then mount a gigantic arithmetical pyramid on two simple assumptions: every mobile phone makes 5 calls a day; and each call is charged for 20 unused seconds.  This is then multiplied by the number of phones in the country and the number of days in the year (which, by contrast, are verifiable facts) and we come to 43 billion baht.

Altogether now: Oooh, aaah.  Isn’t that a big number?

How can the poor, downtrodden mobile phone users of Thailand possibly afford 43 billion baht?  Unless Something Is Done, people will be reduced to sleeping on the street, eating from garbage bins, and only checking their Facebook Likes every couple of hours instead of the normal 20 minutes. 

Fortunately, Somthing can be Done.  We have a military government that does not have to listen to evil self-serving politicians (especially those elected by the citizenry).  And the constitution that the military kindly wrote for us contains Section 44, which empowers our Dear Leader of the National Council for Peace and Order to ‘issue any order or direct any action to be done or not to be done, irrespective of whether the order or action would produce legislative, executive or judicial effect.’

Unfortunately, Gen Prayuth is reluctant to wield the sledgehammer of Section 44 to crack the peanut of counting mobile phone usage by the second, but rest assured that It will be Done.

Next in line are the highly discriminatory fares charged by the BTS Skytrain.  These are calculated by the number of stations and the consumer rights advocates are not so silly as to object to the fact that travelling from one station to the next costs just 15 baht whereas travelling 2 stations down the line costs 22 baht and not 30.  There is the wear and tear on the fabric of the stations where one departs and arrives to consider, after all, a cost that does not occur in the intermediate stops.

But they are silly enough to note that the stations are not equidistant and conclude that this is grossly unfair.  While a passenger travelling from Ratchadamri to Sala Daeng is carried 1.34 km for their 15 baht, the oppressed masses who pay the same amount to get from Chit Lom to Phloen Chit only get to go 630 metres, barely half the distance.

Nor do these disparities work themselves out over longer distances.  A Siam to Nana journey costs exactly the same as one from Asok to Ekkamai.  But the first only gets you 2.36 km from where you started, whereas the second whisks you onward for a whole 3.31 km.  That’s a whole kilometre more!

With hundreds of passengers on each train and hundreds of trains a day and, don’t forget, hundreds of days a year, that means millions of kilometres a year!  Convert that into money (and I leave the reader to concoct some authentic-sounding arithmetic) and it becomes clear that the BTS (which, you may have noted, has no competing line running alongside it) is gouging the travelling public for billions a year.

At this point, the righteous custodians of the flame of fairness in all things however fatuous split into two camps.  The more practical faction argues that fares (rounded to the nearest satang) should be calculated by the metre. 

The more rigid ideologues, noting that fares have been negotiated as part of the BTS contract and changing them will be an inordinately lengthy and complicated process, seek a swifter solution.  Passengers should be taken the full distance to which their fare entitles them, even this means going way past where they want to go and large crowds getting on and off between stations and walking along the live rails. 

As Bangkok commuters are electrocuted in droves, they can rest assured that their rights to a scrupulously fair deal are being safeguarded.  Already in the pipeline are plans to sell beer by the bubble (since some brands are fizzier than others) and to standardize the number of noodles per phat thai.

Some observers, however, think that national reform will best be achieved if each NRC member (and they are all paid the same outrageous salary, after all) is allocated a fixed number of ideas.  And once they’ve reached their quota, they will have to stop thinking.

About author:  Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).