I recently bought a mobile phone from a friend, a Sony Ericsson K610i. It wasn’t brand new, but it was quite cheap and it has a lot of nice features (tatoeba, a 2mp camera, expandable memory up to 2gb, etc). Besides, I needed a phone I could call my own, so I thought it was worth buying. There was only one catch though. The phone is Smart-locked, and I have been a Globe user for years. But I figured it would be easy and cheap to have it unlocked.
Or so I thought.
When I asked around regarding the cost of having such phone unlocked, they told me it was a whopping PhP2500-3500! It took me a few seconds to stop blinking successively in disbelief. I went home very disheartened and mulled over the thought of shifting services to Smart or (ulp!) paying such an unreasonable amount just to keep my number. I just couldn’t decide.
Two days after, I asked another cellphone repair shop who told me they can unlock my phone for the price of PhP1500. I decided to go for it, after asking for a PhP300 discount, to which they agreed. I went home after more than 3 hours of waiting, happy, and with Ph Globe blinking on my phone’s LCD.
It would give me great pleasure to end the story there, but unfortunately, there is a sequel to such a sad tale. Right after the line was unlocked, I noticed that my phone would occasionally shut down on its own. And at one time it even changed its theme on its own. I tried to ignore the fact that there was a problem but since it was occurring rather frequently, I had to take it back to the shop. Mister Technician reformatted the phone and told me that I should observe it and return it to him if it would spontaneously shut down again. I went back to him after an hour with the same problem. Mister Technician told me that he will reprogram (reinstall, do full-flush reformat, whatever!) the phone, but since it was already late, I told him I’d go back the next day.
At this time, it would be really “nice” to point out the fact that as I was walking around the mall, a technician from another shop, recognizing me from my previous visit to their shop (where they told me I needed to pay them PhP2500 for unlocking services), ran after me and told me that they made a mistake, that their boss told them that such service would only cost PhP600. I gritted my teeth and politely thanked him for informing me, at the same time plotting at the back of my mind gadzillions of ways to make him die.
So yesterday, I went back to have my phone reprogrammed (or I really don’t know what he did), and when I went back after two hours, Mister Technician was proudly telling me that after he has "fixed" it, the phone has stayed on with no noted problem for more than an hour. I thanked him, inserted my Globe sim card into the phone, and turned it on.
The screen read: Please insert correct sim card.
After more than a week of going back and forth to the phone shop, they have succeeded in locking my phone back to Smart.
I do not know if I should laugh or cry.
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