A Mercury Retrograde Vortex
I seem to be in a Mercury retrograde vortex. That’s certainly what it has felt like over the last few weeks with the Hummy Hum in the new oven…which is still not fixed. I’m on hold with the manufacturer and really really hoping that the next replacement part will take care of that issue.
But, today it was something else and I just need to get this off my chest. So please bear with me.
Have you ever tried to unlock an iPhone through your service provider? It should be totally easy. Right? Ha! I have about 6 hours in on this little project over the course of one week and it’s not completely resolved yet.
The story actually began several weeks ago when a friend who had upgraded to the latest iPhone (I think that’s the 6) offered to sell me their iPhone 5s for a reasonable amount. I decided to go ahead and make this upgrade as my 4s is showing its age. Basically that means that whenever I download the updates the phone gets slower and more unresponsive. It’s only 4 years old but in this high tech world that is pretty ancient I guess. Plus, my friend suggested a service that I could send my old phone into and they would resell the phone. What I nifty way to recycle and actually get paid to do so…if it were unlocked.
Going to my phone provider’s website, I found the page that had the instructions of how to request my phone be unlocked. I entered all the information required to the best of my ability on the web form. So far so good. Within minutes I received an email saying that my request had been denied as the user information I had supplied didn’t match up to what they had. Oh dear!
I called up and spoke with a very nice person who said that an expedited request would be put in to take care of this issue and that I would hear back two days later with a decision. I called at the end of the 2nd day and was told to call back the following week. One wonders if this is standard procedure on the afternoon before a weekend.
Today being Monday, I called again and was told that the request had been denied and to try submitting the information again as a new request. Which I did…in fact after receiving three more email denials about the phone that I have been the ONLY owner and user of, I was nearing the bang head on desk moment.
But, I thought instead of calling in and following the prompts so I would be routed to the correct department, that I would just keep pressing “0” until I got to someone who might possibly know something. This turned out to be a brilliant strategy and I am now very very close to unlocking the phone.
Apparently password and passcode are two different things and I was putting in one when I should have been putting in the other. Well, once that was figured out, with the help of the wonderful phone support person who stayed with me every step of the way, I got the email saying my request to unlock was successful and to finish off the process I would need to make sure the SIM card was in the phone and….
SIM card? Oh no! I patiently explained that when I took the 5s phone to the local store to activate it, the sales person who worked there took out my old 4s SIM card and with a pair of scissors cut it to fit the 5s! Then they took the SIM card that the 5s came with and THREW IT AWAY! I thought this was really weird so I contacted my friend and also customer service at my phone provider. Both said “THEY DID WHAT????” Unbelievable! So my provider sent me, a new SIM card of the correct size to install in my 5s phone which I successfully did. Who knew paper clips to be the perfect tool to open up the SIM card tray.
And I bet you didn’t know that I knew so much about this kind of stuff. Well, apparently I don’t know enough because the last steps in unlocking the old iPhone 4s require it to have a SIM card in place…you know the one the local sale person “trimmed”. It has been trimmed so much that it is too small to fit in the tray so I can finish this little project. Sooooo…I am waiting once again for a new untrimmed 4s SIM card to be shipped to me so I can finally…FINALLY finish the unlocking process and send the phone to the service that will recycle and resell it and I will get a few shekels in return.
I’m heading back to the kitchen to bake. That’s MUCH easier.
This is technology I can relate to.