Pulling Out Your Own Hair, and Other Joys Of Cell-Phone Contracts

Nikon D4 Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/4, ISO 2200 —
map & image data — nearby photos

What an ordeal. I spent almost eight hours at a SoftBank mobile-phone store today, trying to get some
new phones set up. I have the phones in hand, but I'm still only halfway there.

The two-year contract for my and my son's iPhones is up for renewal this month. We've been with provider Docomo, and if we
stick with them for a two-year renewal, our thanks is a 60% price increase(!) So, I'm moving to SoftBank, where for the same price
we would have had for our two old phones, we get upgraded to the latest iPhones, and also add in another iPhone for my wife for
essentially free.

And as another bonus, the SIM-lock can be removed after half a year, as opposed to Docomo, which refused to remove the SIM-lock
on the new phone I'd paid full-price cash for.

So, that's the good news. The bad news is that it took almost eight hours to get the purchase done. It was ridiculous.
Much of the problem came from the SoftBank store manager, who was either too sloppy about things, or perhaps purposefully
over-promising early on in the hopes that once committed I'd not hold him to his word later on. I dunno.

Part of the problem may not be SoftBank's (or the manager's) fault, but whatever organization they use for credit checks.
They entered umpteen permutations of my name in English and Japanese, along with various supporting documentation
(passport, residency card, utility bill, etc.), and had to wait 15~20 minutes each time for the answer to come back. And wait we did, as the manager literally just sat there pressing “refresh” on his order-entry iPad, over and over and over
again until the result (rejection) came in.

At one point he'd run out of ideas with what I had on me, so I ran home to get my passport and some utility bills. He neglected to say that the utility bills had to display my home address on them, which almost killed things, but
luckily one of the ones I happened to bring did have my address on it.

After so many failures, he even suggested that maybe my 14-year-old son could be the owner of record. This was just
ridiculous. But luckily, after about five hours, the approval came through and he quickly set up my new phone, as well
as my son's.

When I asked about my wife's new phone, he said “Oh, that's in Uji”. Uji is a city to the south, perhaps an hour's drive
away during an off-season rush-hour like today. Early on he'd said there's be no problem getting all the phones today,
and now that he had confessed that it was so far away, he suggested to set up a temporary phone for her and have it swapped
to the real one another day.

I got a bit testy and said I expected him to do what he said. There was some thought that he'd personally go to pick it up,
which would take hours. In the end, someone from that store brought it via the train, so that saved half of a round trip. It still took more than 90 minutes.

Finally, it shows up and I'm about ready to sign the final contract and suddenly the price is $20/month more than he'd
told me earlier. He casually explains about how they weren't able to get such-and-such a discount to stick for one of the three
phones, so the price is higher. NO! More than a bit testy, I told him that I expected him to honor the price he told me,
and that any issues about how to arrive at it is not my problem.

All that settled, I return home, but my problems were just beginning.

I hooked up my wife's new phone to her computer so that I could restore it from an iTunes backup,
and was told that the phone requires a newer version of iTunes. Unfortunately, there is no newer version
of iTunes for the version of OSX on her computer.

So, that means that we have to upgrade her operating system, but her computer is so old that it's probably not
supported by Apple, which means we probably have to get a new computer for her. Such fun.

Not wanting to deal with any of that now, I just backed up her old phone to my modern computer, and then restored
her new phone from that backup. It all seemed to work fine, except I guess music is not part of an iPhone backup,
so all her music is gone.

Sigh. Modern smartphones are super convenient, but when things don't go smoothly, it's a special little slice of hell.