SA telecomms sucks unbelievably badly

Okay, that's a really bad title, but dealing with these people makes me so irritated I lose the ability to ... umm... phrase things nicely (I know there's a word for that, but I can't think of it now. Which just proves my point).

I'm on a vodacom prepaid/contract "worst of both worlds" thing (I think I've mentioned this before), so I can't load databundles on my vodacom sim. So since mtn's prepaid bundles are half the price of vodacom's out of bundle rate, I thought I'd try them out.

So I bought a cheap sim, bought R30 worth of airtime, loaded a R10 bundle - worked great. Except that you can only have 1 bundle every 30 days, which is insane. So the rest of my R30 got spent on out-of-bundle rates.

So I bought another cheap sim, tried to buy R100 worth of airtime to get a 100MB bundle. There is no R100 voucher. So I made up a R100 by buying R15, R30, and a R60 voucher. Loaded them, tried to load a bundle.

Only to get told that I don't have enough money for a bundle, and I need to load R100 worth of airtime. Huh? I thought maybe my airtime that I'd just loaded hadn't been registered yet, so I checked my balance - I have R15 that expires on something like the 2nd of Feb, and R90. This I don't really understand.

I'm guessing that since a data bundle lasts for 30 days, but R15 of my airtime expires before those 30 days are up, I can't buy a bundle. It seems ridiculous, but I can't think of any other explanation. I can't get an answer from mtn either - I phone 173, eventually got to the prepaid gprs option, pressed 5, and got disconnected. Tried again, only to sit there for 15 minutes while being told that my call would be answered just as soon as an operator was available! (At least they didn't say that my call was important to them - that always just pisses me off even more).

So now I am seriously pissed off with mtn - I have R100 airtime, I want a 100MB data bundle. Simple as that - why does everything involving telecomms in this country have to be so damn complicated? And always end up screwing the customer?

Update:
I posted this issue on the mybroadband forum, and posted a complaint on hellopeter. First thing the next morning I got a phone call from someone at MTN SP, who wanted the cell number of the relevant sim card and said that someone from MTN would get back to me - which they did, the next day. They said that in future I should buy two R60 vouchers - which is totally ridiculous, since what am I supposed to do with extra R20, especially since you can only load one bundle every 30 days! - and that R15 vouchers are only meant for voice and sms's, since they expire in 30 days - not that it says this anywhere on their site (that I could find), nor on the voucher, nor in the little handbook that comes with the sim card.

In the meantime, one of the MTN guys who hangs out in the forum got it sorted for me. He said that it's just that their IVR system can't handle a combination of vouchers that expire and vouchers that don't, and he got my 100Mb bundle loaded for me. So that's great - but how many other poor suckers don't have anyone to sort these kinds of issues out for them?