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read between the lines
gone in <60 seconds the day right after my last post, bam! my resolve was put to the test again. on monday itself my bulky old nokia 3310 got stolen within seconds at the jb customs due to my carelessness in leaving the front zipper of my bag open during the time i got out of the car, went through the passport-stamping area and proceeded to board the bus. that's when i fumbled for my ez-link card and realised my phone, which i was fiddling with in the car, was gone.my worst fears were confirmed when i got to the s'pore side (jb customs is really bad in the sense that it doesn't have a public phone in any of its premises) and used one of the public phones to call my number, which was disengaged halfway the first attempt and then out of service the following attempts (meaning the phone was deliberately switched off). so there you go, my phone of six years, gone within a matter of seconds due to simple folly and the logical assumption that no one would be desperate enough to steal a phone with a trade-in value of rm50. but apparently i was wrong. then began the headache of calling my mom to come and fetch me, calling my agent to ask her to tell my boss (i couldn't remember her number) i wouldn't be able to come into work for the day and making the necessary police reports and barring of lines. i was able to retain my local line's number and remaining credit (not counting the rm10 or so that the thief had been frantically using up), but was unfortunately unable to say the same for my foreign line (the operator had a different policy), which was sad because it was such an easy-to-remember number code consisting of four repeated numbers. what's even sadder is the new foreign number i got (again, different policy so i had a limited choice of less than 10 equally befuddling number codes) is hard to remember and has less repetition of its numbers. and of course i had to get a new phone, which was another headache. it had been my eventual ambition to own a nokia 7360 if i ever was to get a new phone (i gave up totally after my first attempt at purchasing a brand new motorola c650 ended with the phone screwing up every few days and having my data wiped out by the warranty repairmen), which was why i decided to purchase it in jb, after hunting high and low for this rare phone. not only was the warranty card from a different phone and wasn't even free (i had to fork out rm99 for it, i mean who pays for warranty cards unless you're in a corrupt society?), but i found out days later to my chagrin that this 'brand new' phone had its previous owner's information stored on it with burn marks at the charger cable socket and was non-refundable when my family and i went down to complain. the boss-in-charge mumbled something about having to go somewhere before making himself scarce and left us with his employees to deal with us (he only re-emerged as we walked away). like i said, a corrupt society. his employees, meanwhile, maintained that the phone was still "brand new" as it was a "display set" and that the information stored inside was a result of people testing out their SIM cards on the phone. what kind of brand new phone is that? unfortunately after arguing for over an hour, they stuck to their guns and the only option left was to keep the phone or choose one of similar value. of course there was no phone that cost exactly what i paid for so we had to settle for a slightly more expensive nokia 6300 meaning we had to fork out two hundred bucks more. and just when i thought the nightmare was over, i realised they got away with murder by giving me a faulty battery that dies within half a day and a charger whose 3-pin prongs couldn't fit into the socket holes you find in this part of the world. this charger even had an rm55.90 price tag attached to it and when we finally went to the original nokia shop, they told us this pin prong only exists in european countries. once again, corrupt society :S. so i then incurred more costs by having to buy the original battery and charger since, judging from the experience we had there, no amount of arguing was going to make them return anything. sigh. |
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