Yesterday was something of a busywork day. I went to an Internet café to upload some pictures to Flickr. I wasn’t sure how that would work out, but I wanted to give it a try. I put the SD card into a card reader and plugged it in and then started the upload. I figured I could write in my journal and surf the Internet and chat with people on Facebook while the upload was done in the background. I ended up sitting in the Internet café for nearly three hours, and in the end, I lost the upload. Something went wrong and nothing ended up on Flickr. So that was a failed experiment.

I also ran a couple of errands, and those were more successful. I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I got a pair of glasses at the last minute while in Taiwan. I haven’t been happy with them, but I own them and I thought I would give them a try for a while and see how it goes. Maybe I’ll get used to them. However, the case that they came in is extremely big and heavy. It’s a heavy-duty luxury case from Hugo Boss. I wanted to see about getting a lighter and smaller plastic case. On my bike rides around town, I’d noticed an optical center, and I rode my bike there after I was done at the Internet café. The experience was exactly as I hoped it would be. I asked about getting a case for the glasses, and they opened up drawer after drawer after drawer filled to the brim with old and extra cases. They had all even been filed according to the brand of glasses they originally held. I spent some time going through them and I came up with a pretty good case. It might be just a tiny bit too small as the arms of the glasses have to be tucked in a bit. That might be putting pressure on the hinges. I didn’t think of that until after I bought it and got it home. So now I might cut little notches in the side for the ends of the ear pieces to stick out. They charged me P100 ($2.50) for the case, which seemed a bit steep for this place. But I can’t really complain.

The next errand was quite a bit more complicated, or so I expected. This was to get a SIM card for my phone. I had brought my cell phone from Taiwan with me, and I wondered if it would work here. I didn’t have any definite plans to have a cell phone with me, but it seems to be the norm here. I can see a cell phone being useful.

I had spoken to a friendly, young Filipino guy at the hostel earlier and he had said that Globe was the best provider to go with. I had no reason to doubt him and I set off to get a Globe SIM card. My advisor said that I could get a card at any cell phone shop and it would cost about P100 ($2.50). Other people had told me it would cost about P150 ($4).

I rode my bike downtown to the area right around the LCC shopping mall. I remembered seeing cell phone shops there. I locked my bike up on the sidewalk to a gas line and went inside this very crowded and active place. I tried to explain myself to a woman inside the shop, and as I always do, I made things very complicated. However, once she figured out what I wanted and we both figured out the vocabulary of our transaction, she told me that I needed to go upstairs to see if my phone had “open line.” This phrase “open line” was used by her and by several other people and I eventually figured out that “open line” essentially means “unlocked” in the vocabulary I’m familiar with. This woman kept telling me to go outside the shop and go upstairs to see if my phone was “open line.” I always find this bit of human interaction interesting. It’s something I would never do myself. She was assuming that I knew what going “upstairs” meant. She knew perfectly well because she worked for this company and all that. So she makes the assumption that I know. I’m not sure how people can make that assumption, but they do. I even told her that I had no idea where “upstairs” was. Sure, I could leave the cell phone shop by the front doors and be back out on the street. That’s easy enough. I could also just go “upstairs”. But which of the many hundreds of “go upstairs” options do I choose from? I eventually convinced her to make the effort to come to the front door with me and then point to the other door through which I had to go and then go upstairs. In her shoes, I would have walked the customer over to the proper place from the beginning and even gone upstairs with them. It wouldn’t even have taken any longer than the long and complicated discussion we ended up having about where this mysterious “upstairs” was located.

When I went upstairs, I found myself in a small room containing a work area for cell phone repair. I explained myself to the man, and he understood pretty quickly what I wanted. I wanted to “check open line.” He took the phone from me, slipped off the back, removed the battery and my SIM card from Taiwan, and inserted a local SIM card. He then turned the phone on, pressed a few buttons, and told me that my phone was “open line.”

I found that I was slightly suspicious throughout this whole process. I had found the business of the cell phone store a bit offputting. Then there was the whole “open line” and “upstairs” discussion. Plus, this guy seemed equally abrupt and less than informative. I suppose it is human nature that when you don’t understand what is going on, your first reaction is to be suspicious. It must be a survival mechanism. When I don’t understand something, I don’t immediately assume that the other people are doing something very nice and generous for me. I make the assumption that they are plotting something bad. And in this case, my suspicions turned out to be correct. The man didn’t explain what he was doing and he sort of took my phone away to a distant location on the bench and sort of turned his back to me. He also seemed to be handling the phone very roughly, and I didn’t appreciate that. Then, when he brought the phone back to me and told me that it was “open line”, he handed it back to me and seemed to be hustling me out of the area. I had to go downstairs now to get a SIM card. I try to go slow in these situations so that I understand everything, so instead of leaving right away, I took a beat or two. That’s when I noticed that the man had switched the battery in my phone. He had replaced my brand name Nokia battery – in excellent condition I might add – with some piece of junk that he had lying around the shop, clearly hoping that I wouldn’t notice. I did notice, however. I spotted a scuffed up and rather dirty and scratched battery just as this guy went to replace the back cover. I stopped him and said that something didn’t look right. Was that my battery? There was something odd about it, I said. It didn’t look right. At that time, I was somewhat flustered by the whole experience, and I didn’t realize what had happened. It’s not like I look at the battery in my cell phone all the time. I probably hadn’t looked at it for years. Something just didn’t feel right. The man said that everything was fine. I had “open line” and here was the battery and he went to close up the phone again. I stopped him and took the phone from him and took a closer look. I was getting more convinced that this wasn’t my battery. I pressed him on this and he went back to the work bench and did a big fake “Aha!” gesture when he found my original battery. He then brought it over. As soon as I saw my real battery, I recognized it. That was clearly my good battery. I asked the man in a half-joking way if he had been trying to steal my battery. He didn’t react in any way and just kept urging me to leave his work area and go back downstairs. Instead of doing that, I carefully removed the battery and then checked to see if my SIM card from Taiwan was still inside. It was. After thinking things through and making sure that I had everything, I went downstairs and back into the cell phone store.

With my experience of the repairman trying to steal my battery, I was not inclined to buy my SIM card from this store, but I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of finding a new place. Unfortunately, the woman who had helped me earlier was busy and a man came to help me. I say unfortunately because despite the woman’s inability to explain the concept of “upstairs” very precisely, she had at least seemed friendly and competent. This man was a typical man – lost in the field of customer service – unhelpful and less than competent.

The problem was that I had no idea what I was doing. I had never purchased a SIM card overseas before. In fact, that SIM card from Taiwan is, I believe, the only SIM card I’ve ever purchased. I’m sure that for everyone in the world, buying a new SIM card and unlocking phones and roaming and all that stuff is second nature. In the Philippines, it is now ingrained. People live and breathe this stuff. You can’t turn around in this country without seeing a sign advertising that you can “Load na ditto” at this or that shop. In the Philippines, when you buy more credit for a phone, you buy a load. It’s very funny to see the many ways this concept is used. You can get your load here or get your load there.

Anyway, I didn’t have the ins and outs of this process at my fingertips and so there was some confusion as the man just told me to buy a SIM card. He brought me to your typical shop window – a tiny space with heavy iron bars – and shouted something like “SIM card” through it at the attractive woman sitting beyond. I tried to talk to this guy about SIM cards. Which carrier was the best? My friend had recommended Globe. What did he think? What did he recommend? What are the differences? This man gave almost no response. He barely seemed capable of looking at me. He pointed to a big chart on the wall that had at least 50 different items listed in many different columns with numbers and facts everywhere. Globe was there as were many other names that were clearly cell phone service providers. But beyond that, I couldn’t make any sense out of it. There was “talk’n text” this and “talk’n test and surf” that and tons of technical vocabulary. It seemed I had to choose a SIM card based on which of these dozens of different services I wanted. I had no way to make that decision and tried to get this guy to break it down for me. He was no help at all. I kept hammering away at him with questions though and through his answers and some thinking, I realized that this big chart was not referring to SIM cards. These were all the “load na ditto” options. So Globe 100 and Globe 300 and Globe 500 were not different SIM cards. Those were cell phone “loads” of 100 pesos, 300 pesos, and 500 pesos. They were recharge cards, not SIM cards. So it seemed that the SIM card decision really was a simple one. You just pick a provider and get the card. So I went to the window and tried to tell the woman I wanted a Globe SIM card. She said some things, but through the tiny window and the thick bars and glass, I couldn’t hear anything and just grunted and nodded and hoped for the best. I had to write down my name and address on a smallish form and then I was given a Globe SIM card plus a 300 pesos recharge card. The SIM card itself cost only P40 ($1).

Now that I had these two delightful items, I wanted to simply tuck them away and then go over them in detail back at the hostel. I love stuff like this. People come to the Philippines to swim in crystal clear water and climb volcanoes, but I get just as much pleasure (probably more) out of these little things like buying a SIM card. It was a new and exciting experience for me.

However, I didn’t want to leave without going over my purchase right away and I decided to forego the pleasure of leisure and put in the SIM card right away. I found a quiet spot (sort of) and carefully opened my phone and took out the old SIM card. I then opened up the packaging of the new SIM card. I asked the man questions about this, about whether there was something special I had to do, but he was of no help at all. I put in the SIM card, reinserted my (good) battery, and then turned on the phone. To my delight, the screen lit up with the little word Globe up in the top left corner and I had several bars of reception. Things seemed good to go. I decided to forego the pleasure of putting in my “load” of 300 pesos. I would do that back at the hostel when I had more space and leisure. I did try to task the guy about how to do that. The instructions on the back of the card said that I had to enter a Card Number and then a Card PIN. But there was only one section of grey stuff that you scraped away. I assumed the PIN number was under that gray area. So where was the Card Number? The man had no idea what I was talking about and he went to ask the woman. She smiled at his ignorance and gave him the answer. He tried to explain it to me, but he didn’t seem to understand it either. In the end, I gave up and figured it would make sense when I tried to do it. When I got the card out later, it did in fact make sense. When I scraped away the grey stuff, there were TWO numbers underneath. The card number was on the left and the PIN number was on the right. Mystery solved.

I had to fiddle around a bit more to figure things out. Some but not all of my phone numbers were still there. I guess these numbers were on my phone’s internal memory. Others, for some reason, were on the old SIM card. I figured out that I had to copy all of the old phone numbers from my old SIM card to the phone’s memory. Then I would have them when I put in the new SIM card. I don’t know why phones store phone numbers in different places. A mystery. I also found that most of my phone numbers didn’t work. Only one did, and this was a number that had a plus sign in front of it. I tried to add a plus sign to the other phone numbers, but I didn’t know how to produce a plus sign. This morning, I asked a woman in the hostel, and she showed me how it was done. That worked beautifully and I called Canada to test it out. I chatted for a while and I quickly burned through my 300 peso “load”. I’m such a primitive soul and so out of date with technology that simply being able to call Canada on my cell phone from the Philippines is very exciting and cool. Of course, it’s not exciting or cool at all. It’s just normal. But it’s exciting for me.

More good news is that I found a very nice little restaurant in this neighborhood. It’s what they would call an eatery locally. Great food at a great price.

 

Tags: cell phone, Legazpi, open line, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, SIM, Taiwan