Daughter and I needed to update our phone contracts recently which meant a new phone for her and a new contract for me.
Aware of Mercury being retrograde from October 4th-25th, I was pleased to note that the actual contracts ran out on September 30th and this was the date I contacted our phone company to arrange the new contracts.
For those of you who don’t know, Mercury is the planet of communication and when it’s retrograde or on go slow in the heavens, you often find that technology plays up.
Astrologically this is because one of Mercury’s archetypes is the trickster and when the communication planet is giving the illusion of going backwards in the heavens, this smacks of communication chaos.
So new phone and a Sim card arrived last week and I decided as daughter’s phone was a shiny brand spanking new iPhone, that it would be nice to present it to her on her birthday, October 8th. Fast forward to Wednesday night when it came to setting up the phone. Here is the sequence of events:
– We presumed (wrongly) that the Sim card which had arrived was for the new phone.
– The Sim card wasn’t for the new phone but is sent out as standard when you renew your contract so it was for my old phone (although I didn’t actually need it).
– We only realised that the Sim card wasn’t the right one when we opened the phone and found out that it required a nano-Sim and not a micro-Sim.
– By the time we found this out, daughter had already texted the phone company to instruct them to transfer her mobile number to the new phone (but she hadn’t told me).
– We then googled Sim cards to see if we could cut down the Sim card that had been sent. Yes we could, but not an easy task.
– I decided to ring the phone company to ask whether we were meant to cut down the micro-Sim to make a nano-Sim. No, the shiny new phone should have come with it’s Sim card already installed. Oh dear, their mistake. They would send out a new one in the first class post and because of their mistake would make sure her number was transferred on to it.
– I came off the phone: ‘Great’, I said. All sorted. Daughter then told me that she had already texted the phone company to transfer her number. We realised this would mean she would be without a phone once her old Sim card expired.
– I phoned back the phone company to stop the transfer of the mobile number and this time listened to some lovely elevator music before talking to an ever-helpful after-sales rep. ‘How did you transfer the old number to a new Sim card if it the phone didn’t arrive with a Sim card?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Ah yes,’ I replied and explained how we’d got a bit muddled with the Sim card that had arrived (see above if you’re now confused yourself).
– After 10 minutes or so whilst he input my daughter’s phone number and details of the ‘fake’ Sim card and went off to talk to his manager to see what could be done, I was told that as the transfer swap was in process but hadn’t gone through, there was nothing they could do to stop it. He did suggest helpfully that when my daughter’s old Sim card stopped working I could phone them again, transfer the number back to the old Sim card and when the new Sim card arrived, start the transfer all over again.
– Head on desk and slightly hysterical at this point, I declined his kind offer. Daughter will just have to be without a phone for a couple of days.
p.s. Nano-Sim card arrived in the post this morning. Now I’m just waiting for daughter to come home from school to see if it works. Fingers & toes crossed!