El Robo de Saldo (The theft of phone credit.) So far, perhaps I have been lucky. I have been on a lot of buses, including crowded urban ones, and I never had anything stolen. I have walked down a few dark and lonely streets and nothing happened. But yesterday I was feeling like I had been robbed. In the mall. In the Centro de Atendimiento a Los Clientes de Claro (The Customer Service Center of Claro, one of the local cell phone companies.). Heres what happened. I had purchased a SIM card for the Claro network in Ecuador a few days before. $7: $4 for the card, and $3 for saldo (phone credit). Already I am feeling like this is too much, because I never had to pay that much for a card in any other country. Then, I check the prices of the prepaid internet packages. With a 7-day package, I only get 100 MB of data, and it costs $5! Too expensive, and too little data! Then, to buy this package, I will need to buy a $6 saldo card. So now I am out $13. Then, I find out that my phone wont work on their data network and the lady who sold me the SIM and the saldo doesnt know anything about that. I will have to visit the Customer Service Center. So I go there yesterday. As I walk in, I check my saldo. Rember that I started with $3+$6 or $9. But apparently a few local calls and a few local texts have burned through over $4 and I only have $4.93 now....not quite enough to buy the expensive 1-week internet package even if we can get my phone to work. I take a number and wait a few minutes. Then I am called to the station where I explain my situation. The atmosphere and layout of this place, and the attitude of the staff is slightly DMV--apathetic, not too friendly or helpful. The lady asks me to change my phones language to Spanish. Then she takes over and starts making configuration changes. She thinks I am done and wants me to leave, but I try activating the internet package and it doesnt work. So she looks me up in their system and has to update something on her side. It wasnt ready. After she updates her system, she asks me to turn my phone off and then back on. Once I do that, the little H appears next to my bars which indicates that now I have data working. And other icons start appearing as well: yahoo mail, work mail, etc. So I immediately go to activate the 1-day internet plan, because I only have $4.93 and that plan costs $1.68. When I try to activate it, the phone says I dont have enough saldo. Impossible! I check my saldo balance: $0.22. I think it through and turn to the lady and ask, When we got started, I checked my balance and had $4.93. How can I only have $0.22 now? Its because we got the data working, and all my emails came in before I bought the package, right? You can restore that credit for me because we were testing and configuring the phone together, right? What do you think happened next?
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 02:12:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015