Adventures in cellular phone acquisitions
I lent Lisa my cell phone yesterday because she was going to a private English school for an interview (she’s interested in doubling up on her work load) and had no idea where she was going. She had the address in pseudo-English - the Chinese sounds written out using the Roman alphabet but without the tones so she had no idea how to pronounce where she wanted to go which made what she DID have practically useless…
Mya accompanied her to the interview. Afterwards, they met up with the boys at a Western restaurant called Café Brussels. I visited this place in June with Tish and Annaick during the World Cup. We went there for my last night in Wuhan. It was Mama-huhu so I stayed home last night. At 5am this morning, I heard everyone coming home. I called to see if Lisa and Colin had enjoyed themselves around noon today and Lisa said she’d get back to me. Around 2:30pm, she came by practically in tears because she couldn’t find my cell phone anywhere. She said she had turned it off as soon as I gave it to her and placed it deep in her purse. Now it has gone missing and she’s really upset about it. I tried explaining to her that the phone was given to me and that it wasn’t that big of a deal. I was sure we could find a cheap replacement, but she was so torn up about it that she wanted to go out and buy a new phone immediately. Any amount of consoling on my part was to no avail, so I went with her to the supermarket to at least check out the prices.
Before that though, we went to McDonald’s. Lisa said she was really upset and wanted some comfort food to lift her spirits. I started thinking about the moral of the movie, Super Size Me, but decided to keep quiet. I hadn’t eaten yet today, so I joined her for some fries and a cheeseburger. Luckily, the portions at McDonald’s are TEENY-TINY in China so it didn’t feel that gluttonous. It was like having a taste of a meal. Every five minutes or so, a woman in a cowboy hat would come out to the floor in front of the bank of cash registers and start shouting in an unconvincing “perky” voice into a loudspeaker about some promotion that was going on. We had no idea what the promotion was exactly, except the cashiers were wearing cardboard hats like the ones that replicate a crown at Burger King only their hats had bullhorns on them. They looked absolutely ridiculous because they were trying to be so serious in the cardboard bullhorn hats. Our other clue was a stand full of free postcards of male and female cows in workout uniforms. The female cows in tight-fitting pink halter shirts with matching pink short-shorts and headbands and the male cows (bulls?) wearing skin-tight wife-beaters and black short-shorts, sporting dumbbells wedged into their hooves. I was too disturbed to take a sample of each as evidence. Lisa and I guessed that the promotion was for a new BBQ-flavored rib-esque sandwich, though we couldn’t find anything on the menu even resembling such a concoction.
The meal continued to be surreal as the cowboy-hat-girl competed with the music being pumped into the restaurant. Photos of four ultra-cool Chinese teenagers were plastered everywhere – the kids awkwardly clutching various musical instruments and flashing their biggest and brightest smiles while the music accosting our ears was canned candy-coated crud (at least it’s in line with the food offered)…and you can just tell by the slightly dazed look deep in the eyes of these children that they’re in over their heads and that they have no idea what is going on…they’re just along for the ride. A group of four teenagers, plucked from obscurity to be a marketing tool for China’s monstrosity – McDonald’s with Chinese characteristics: Mai Dan Lao.
I suppose I should stop criticizing right about now since I gave the company 17 kuai of my own money.
On to cellular phone hell! By this point, Lisa was almost off of her phone-purchasing kick, but we were at the supermarket and she just wanted to take a look. I was sure the phones would be twice as expensive as the one she’d lost and didn’t want her to spend her money on something that just isn’t that important, but she was on a mission. We found a Motorola model that cost 358 kuai (about $45 US) and I was about to tell her we might find one that was even cheaper when I saw the look in her eye that said, “Can I please just get this over with?” We caught the eye of a salesgirl, a very young woman with an even younger assistant and I asked a few questions about the phone. Lisa took out her credit card and asked if she could pay for the phone with the card. She’d tried using the card at this supermarket earlier in the week to no avail, but the salesgirl nodded enthusiastically and said, “Ke yi, Ke yi” (You can, you can). Next, we asked if I could purchase the SIM card at the supermarket, and again we got, “Ke yi, ke yi”. Lisa said she wanted to get it over with and pointed to the Motorola model. The salesgirl went to the side of her booth and pulled out a box with the phone in it. She brought it over to us and took it out to show us that it worked. When she turned the phone on, I asked if there was an English menu function and if so, could she change the phone over to English. She looked hard at me and then scratched her head. After about ten minutes of fiddling with the phone, she handed it to her assistant, who started playing SNAKE on it for all we know while the salesgirl took her own phone and called someone and said “Moto Yinyu Yinyu” over and over.
It was at this point that I looked down and noticed the salesgirl’s nametag, which said, “Saloon Manager”. She hung up her phone and walked over to the end of her booth, took out another phone and came to show us the phone. She said that THIS model had English already programmed as the menu language. I asked how much. She said 630 kuai. I said thanks but no thanks. She went back to fiddling with the Motorola phone. Someone called her own phone back and after a five minute shouting match between the salesgirl and the person on the other end of the phone, she hit a few buttons and pulled up the English menu function. She was ecstatic. She talked excitedly with her assistant until she remembered we’d only just begun the transaction and that she still had a lot of steps to complete.
Next I asked about the SIM card. At first she said it was doable. Then she started asking me for something. I should have known she was asking for a passport. We had no idea what she was asking for and that’s when she drew the picture that you see above. This is a picture of a passport. Lisa and I were in stitches when we figured out that the picture she drew was of identification. Actually, we didn’t figure this out on our own. The assistant went to the desk and found a Xerox of someone else’s identity card and that’s when I remembered that I had needed my passport for the SIM card I bought for the lost phone. The girl was laughing at her drawing too and was happy to let me have it. I tried showing my driver’s license and the assistant said we could use this. Then, the salesgirl got back on her tiny pink cell phone and after another shouting match, she said we couldn’t buy the SIM card at her booth. She kept telling me where we COULD buy it but I didn’t understand her. As a peace offering, she handed Lisa a new umbrella and said, “Here, for you. Present. We like you.” I’ve noticed that you get free things when you make big purchases in China. So far, I’ve only gotten free toothpaste or free tissues for making purchases. Lisa was getting a whole umbrella!
Then, the Saloon manager filled out a receipt in quadruplicate and took Lisa over to the cash register with her credit card. She asked me to stay with the assistant and the cell phone. The assistant took a red stamp pad and a stamp and started stamping the heck out of all kinds of paper work. She stamped the box in two different places, she stamped two of the four receipts, she stamped a sheet of paper I had signed and she stamped a sheet of paper that came out of the Motorola manual.
Then, Lisa and the salesgirl walked back over to the booth and while the salesgirl looked nervous and crestfallen, Lisa looked like she was about to lose it. After all that, her card wasn’t taken at this supermarket, something Lisa was almost positive she knew but which the salesgirl hadn’t known. We were starting to see that she should go back to being a Saloon manager and leave cell phones to someone else. Adding insult to injury, she made Lisa return the umbrella. As we were walking out, both the Saloon manager and the little assistant flashed toothy grins and said, “Try again thanks for here!”
When we got outside, we saw that it had started to rain.
