Who would have thought that Taylor Swift and I have something in common? And what may that be, you ask? Well, we both fought Apple and we both won. Unlike Taylor, I won’t get a lot of money for my victory but at least I can use my not-so-smart-phone with a German SIM card. That’s the phone which I had come to believe I had bought for real money a while ago anyway. Alas, why would Apple respectively AT&T care?
This one goes (in alphabetical order) to Paul and Vivek, my knights in shining armor, who couldn’t accept that AT&T would seriously insist on me flying 10k miles one way to walk into one of their stores to have this tiny piece of software unlocked without breaking the phone (jailbreak or otherwise) and encouraged me to talk to AT&T’s customer service one, two, three more times. Luckily, my middle name is “Persistence” and double-luckily, the last person in AT&T’s customer service was eventually tired of fighting with the person with the ugly German accent. And that finally resulted in having him direct me to the “Unlock Request Form” and whoowhoo! unlock the phone (maybe – after a 72 hour processing period).
How can one tell that her phone is unlocked and why would a back-up to iTunes only take 2 minutes? Who better to answer these burning questions than one of the fruit geniusses in the blue T-shirts. So I spent another 2 hours in the Apple Store this morning, amongst crowds and crowds of tourist who’s Apple devices were broken and kept them from taking selfies until my personal blue-T-shirt guy was ready for me and got it fixed in less than half an hour.
Without you guys in Menlo Park and a little help from a bunch of rather reluctant customer (what’s that?) service (never heard of?) persons I’d never have come that far. That is, to have a usable working phone without any data loss. IOU!