I’ve been having phone woes for more than a week already.
Oh, before I continue, a very important announcement:
Please DO NOT SMS me until further notice. Because I won’t know who you are and I can’t reply you.
Well, you can still SMS me if you don’t need a reply. But do identify yourself so I know who you are.
Calling would be better.
So, here’s what happened:
On Sep 4, I bought an iPhone 3G.
It worked fine for three days.
I just had some trouble copying phone numbers from my old SIM card to the iPhone. Like, only 20 out of 200 numbers went in. And I don’t have time to manually type in phone numbers, so now i don’t know who’s calling or SMSing me.
On Sep 8, my outgoing SMS broke down. Nobody received my SMSes the whole day and I only realised that late at night.
I was supposed to meet a director for lunch on Sep 9. He tried to arrange a time and location via SMS. When I realised my replies weren’t getting to him, I called, only to hear a voice message saying, “Please SMS me.”
The lunch didn’t happen.
I called SingTel to get help and this guy made me key in this series of numbers, supposedly to fix it. But it only made it worse. Now, when I send an SMS, it will say “Error sending message”.
On Sep 9, I went to the SingTel shop at Golden Shoe, where I was served by a young lady. She looked bored and impatient the whole time and kept interrupting me while I was trying to explain my problem.
She kept trying to pin the blame on the iPhone and asking me to visit Comcenter (where there’s iPhone support).
Until I explained that I had already tested both my phone and SIM card on another phone and SIM card, and found the problem to solely lie in my SIM card.
Finally, she assigned me a new SIM card, which she said would be activated latest the next day (Sep 10).
Well, it’s now Sep 16 and my new SIM card is still not activated and my outgoing SMS is still down.
I’ve been too busy since to follow up on this.
And my iPhone contact list still only has 20 numbers but I don’t want to do anymore until I can use my new SIM card!
Argh.
You won’t realise that you’ve become too dependent on SMS until you lose the ability to use it.
I never really liked SMS in the first place, although I do admit it’s convenient at times. I just hate it when people try to have long conversations via SMS. If you have something to discuss that requires more than 200 characters to reply, why can’t you just call, for goodness’ sake?
In the past week, I’ve received tons of SMSes which I can’t reply. And I don’t know who sent them.
I wonder if they think I hate them because I don’t reply them.
But I can’t possibly be calling everyone who SMSes me just to say, “Hey, sorry, I don’t know who you are and I can’t SMS you back, but thanks for SMSing me!”
I feel so handicapped. I never realised that SMS has become such an important function in life.
Just for the record, though, I love my iPhone. It won’t port my phone book properly and sometimes it hangs when I zoom in and out too much while surfing the net, but I still love it.
I just feel very troubled that we’ve become so dependent on SMS that it’s become hard to function without it.