Life & Times

I finally managed to get my phone line active today. I wont go until all the boring details about how I sat with them trying for them to explain they wanted “more” of my money. As you already know, for the first day of service was to start on November 1st but since on my “demo” day I used the internet for the entire day they billed me 2.5RMB ($0.38) per hour for a total of 50RMB ($7.78) for that “demo” day. They only issue was that since I never paid them for that time used on my “demo” day my account would stay in-active until the “bill” was paid in full. They never told this to me, or even said anything to Jian until she called them the other day and we had it confirmed today. Their slogan “Customer First, Service Foremost” is very true. First you need to become their customer so they can get your money, once you are their customer they “edit” the deal and that’s where the “Service Foremost” part comes in. “Service Foremost” really means that service will be given to most of their customers while they mess around with the others.

I called my cell to make sure the phone line works and it does but now because I upgraded my PC to the Windows 7 RTM, I had to setup the connection once more. The only problem is, I can’t read what technician wrote. Even the Chinese is written so poorly I can’t match it with anything I’ve ever seen. His “English” letters and numbers are written so poorly that I can’t make out what anything is. Now because this information is “private” I need to get one of my Chinese speaking friends to come over and help me figure it out with China Telecom over the phone or pay them another visit at their office.

On a side note, if I had not paid for this “demo” day they would have never activated my account ever. Which means, they would have kept my 1 years work of pre-payment and never provided me with any server and after the one year, they would simply start billing me monthly. I just find it so hard to live here some times when things like this happen but I need to remember “This is China”.