Remember the days when you wanted to watch a channel on television, so all you had to do was punch in that number on the dial? Now the television remote itself is virtually useless, since everyone now watches television through either a satellite or digital cable receiver which carries with it a remote complex enough to launch a nuclear warhead. Or how about when you wanted to make a phone call, and you’d just punch in the number of the person you wanted to call- now? Don’t get me started.
Last week I told you about my adventures in having my trusty warhorse of a Blackberry breakdown on me.
Well, you’d think getting a replacement would be easy; buy a phone, plug it in, rock and roll. What I didn’t know was I’d be slowly but surely wading into a world of hackers, international copyright law, and mind-altering, infuriating frustration.
Misstep #1
After my Blackberry broke (IE: half the keys stopped working, and messages began to disappear at random) I began shopping for a replacement. A brand new phone bought at my wireless carrier (the monsters at Bell Mobility) would have cost me between $400-600 + tax (I refuse to sign my soul over to a three-year contract in order to subsidize the phone). Well, that much money I ain’t gonna spend, so I went to where all adventurous misers go looking for a deal: craigslist. After a few hours of searching, I met a nice Lesbian couple at the corner of Yonge and Bloor selling their brand new in box Blackberry Curve for $250. It was unlocked they told me. It would work on Bell Mobility they assured me. Well, unbeknownst to me, while it may have been unlocked, it was a GSM phone, and Bell only accepts Blackberries on the CDMA network. If not for the grainy and dark (but marvellously loud) video of the two being intimate (thank you for that by the way) they phone would have been a complete wash for me. I managed to sell the phone on craigslist, making a profit of $20(!) and was on my way to the next phone.
Misstep #2
Learning from past mistakes, I knew that I definitely needed a CDMA phone, and not a GSM one. So a few days later I bought a CDMA Blackberry Curve from a pleasant but Ed Hardy draped Arab gentlemen at a nearby Loblaws. I quadruple checked that the phone was the CDMA 8530 version and not the dastardly 8520 version before paying the man and going on my way. Of course what I didn’t know was that the phone was with TELUS, and not Bell, and thus again would not work on my plan. What I also didn’t know until after re-selling it on craigslist was the phone was stolen, and that the only way the new seller would be able to reactivate it would be to bribe the previous owner; out of guilt, and some misplaced sense of honour, I split the reactivation bribe with the poor sap who bought the phone off me, not only wiping out my profit from the previous sale, but leaving me about 50 bucks in the hole.
By the way a week had past, I’d logged about 20 km in driving from meeting place to meeting place, and I was still using my original Blackberry POS.
Misstep #3, 4 5 and 6
Perhaps learning my lesson from the previous blunders I decided to get off craigslist and go to an actual store. After some research I found a little hole in the wall shop that sold unlocked Blackberries for about the same amount I’d have paid on craigslist. Not only that, but they had three (!) Bell Blackberry Curves that were guaranteed to work on the Bell Network! It was like I’d reached the end of the rainbow.
When I told him the difficult time I’d had in getting functional phones, the guy behind the counter offered to phone Bell on speakerphone, read the serial #s of each individual phone and listen to the Bell Customer Service guy announce to me that the phone was in perfect working condition. Umm, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Phone #1 had a remaining balance of over a thousand dollars on it.
Phone #2 was stolen.
Phone #3 wasn’t even registered.
After a good ten minutes of listening to the guy behind the counter curse at the customer service guy (he had the serial numbers all cleared when he bought them off the street) he sold me the fourth, supposedly good phone. Of course when I went across the street to the Bell store to get it activated, it wouldn’t work; wrong network they told me, it was a T-Mobile phone, not Bell.
When I went back to the store and asked for my money back, the two workers behind the counter looked at each other with worried looks on their faces;
“Ummm... while you were gone we spent all your money. I mean, you could break our legs if you want to, but that isn’t going to get you back your money or a new phone.”
Out of guilt, and good ole’ customer service, the two decided to do right by me and gave me a slightly used iPHONE. Worth slightly more than what I paid for the useless Blackberry, they decided to call it even and threw in a nice case.
They even showed me how they ‘jailbroke’ the phone, a method in which you hack the iPHONE in order to work on any server and download apps for free. So there I was- after three hours in a grimy basement store in a strip mall, an unintentional iPHONE user...
And for the two days that my phone actually worked, it was bilss.
Misstep #7
See, the things about iPhones that are ‘jailbroke’ is that you can never use the most recent version of the Apple software for the iPhone. See, the minute a hacker ‘jailbreaks’ the iPHONE software, Apple comes out with a patch to fix it, which in turn causes hackers around the world to come up with a hack to jailbreak it, a dance that goes on for hours, days, sometimes weeks. Unfortunately for me, I inadvertently downloaded the most recent, and so far unhacked version of the iPHONE software while trying to sync my iPHONE with iTunes (the crappiest music software on the planet by the way), thus rendering my new iPHONE unusable until someone comes up with a hack.
How long will that take? Hours, days, weeks? The guy behind the counter said he checks sketchy websites from China, Twitter trends, and message boards at least six times a day. The guy at the Bell store did me a favour and checked his ‘jailbreak guy’ for any incoming news on when it might be available (which contained so much whispering and technospeak jargon it sounded like something from a spymovie.)
Until such a jailbreak is released, I’m left with an inoperable iPHONE, and am forced to use... you guessed it...
Out of pity, the Bell guy reactivated my old Blackberry until my new iPHONE is operational again.
Hey, remember when all you needed to do to make a phone call was dial a number? Save us Zack Morris!
wow...just...wow....
Holy crap! What an ordeal.