15th
“I’m emotional / I hug the block”
When I was in the home stretch of buying my iPhone the other night, it became necessary to call T-Mobile and get my account number because the clerk who was helping me was porting my phone number over from my old phone into the new one. I’d been at the Apple store for about an hour at this point, longer than I had expected, and was running late to meet some family friends who were supposed to pick me up in their car somewhere in the vicinity of Lincoln Center. Basically I wanted to get out of the Apple store as fast as I could, and the fact that I was at the whim of the T-Mobile customer service department made me super nervous. I spoke to the voice-recognition robot tersely. “Agent! Agent!” etc. The Apple girl, who was about my age and really nice/fun, sat to my right the whole time.
Without thinking I was rude to the first T-Mobile person who came on the line because she wouldn’t give me the account number and insisted on passing me onto an “account specialist.” Him I was also rude to, and when he asked, because it’s his job to do so, whether I was thinking about leaving T-Mobile for a different carrier, I answered very unpleasantly to the effect of, yes, I’m sorry, getting an iPhone, already bought one, gotta go now, bye. I was being sort of “funny” for the benefit of the Apple girl but realized as I was doing it that she was no less a customer service person than the two T-Mobile people I’d just treated like non-humans, and that probably my treatment of them had not impressed her. What should have been a triumphant moment— someone at Young Manhattanite said it would turn out to be the “high point of [my] life”— was consequently marked instead by a not insignificant degree of shame.
Today when I called T-Mobile to properly cancel my service, I was nice to the lady who took my call, which made me feel better even though it obviously wasn’t the same lady. She told me something weird, which was actually going to be the whole point of this post before I decided to get the above off my chest: apparently if I hadn’t signed on with AT&T already I could have unlocked my iPhone and stayed with T-Mobile? I told her I didn’t think this was true but she really seemed sure that it was. “Doesn’t that count as hacking or whatever?” I asked, remembering articles I probably read two years ago about vigilantes “freeing” their iPhones. “Doesn’t Apple get mad?” She laughed and said maybe, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. She told me to come back in two years once my AT&T contract was up, then added after a moment: “Then again everything’s probably going to be totally different then.”
Anyone know if it’s true, about iPhones being legitimately unlockable now? Also, should I friend the Apple girl on Facebook? Kinda want to show her I’m not hateful.
