Thursday 7th May 2009 – The Land of the Free

I always thought that 'Land of the Free' meant the people thought they were free, but recently, it has begun to seem as if it's the goods that are free.  Maybe that's why they're in such financial trouble.  I had a splendid night out on free (and almost free) beer the other night.  Now sorting my phone out turns out to be essentially free too.  They can't keep this up.

My cell phone has been a constant problem since I arrived.  I thought I had to have a local phone for reasonable-priced contact straightaway.  So I popped into the nearest phone shop in NYC and bought the cheapest SIM card on offer.  But I couldn't quite manage it the way I expected.  A nice young lady in a Chicago phone shop helped me understand it a bit better.  After that, I could check after a call how much it had cost me.  It was surprisingly expensive.  A young man in a Minneapolis phone shop told me this was because I was on the wrong tariff, and changed it for me at very little cost.  But it was still costing more than I expected.  Finally, it dawned on me that I seemed to be paying for people to call me.  When I checked, this turned out to be true: If you're 'pre-paid', ie pay-as you-go, you pay for called time as well as calling time. 

So my hosts decided to take one step further in their slow-but-inexorable process of adopting me by putting me on their 'post paid' contract.  The young man in the shop was a delight to deal with.  He was a typical mobile-phone salesman, who knew everything about everything, and was not prepared to allow anything to get in the way of the deal.  He had the added attraction of speaking in the rhythms of the black inner city argot.  I was tempted, at one point, to caricature him, but it would be quite unfair, since he actually spoke the same proper English as me: he just had this, not accent but rhythm in the way the spoke.  This added considerably to the conjuring trick which turned out to be going.  The deal was thick with phrases like "that'll be $18, but I'm gonna take care of that for you", and one that foxed me for a while, about giving us a (I think) "mailer for that".  At the end of the 'deal', which took quite a long time, my host ended up with a new phone, I ended up with a new phone, the new phone cost me nothing to use, particularly when someone called me, and none of this cost anybody anything at all.  The young man stood back looking quite pleased with himself, as well he should.  In addition, in the midst of this conjuring trick, he had thrown in a master class in how to deal with a call center when he called the phone company to get the numbers swapped.  As they twisted and turned and tried to pass him off to other departments, he gave them slack, then reeled them in until they were in his keep net.  The whole thing was really, truly, uplifting: commerce as an art form, pure theatre: quite made my day.

 

So now I've got a phone, and a bank account, and money has turned up in the bank account.  I only have to get the van now.  And this is in process, and quite a long way down the line.  Things are looking up.  I shall be off soon.  I wonder if I could hire the young salesman as my 'fixer'?  All those Edwardian explorers had one.  Except, of course, poor old Captain Scott: and look what happened to him!