The thing I’m going to complain about isn’t that the KT shop gave me a note with the address for the service center, but didn’t write the name of the service center (so it was impossible to find and I went to the wrong place, because guess what? All Apple products except iPhones are serviced at one place, and iPhones are serviced at the other).
It’s not that my employer, when offering an iPhone 4 to each professor on tenure track, failed to ask (though when I asked, I was told it had been cleared, of course) whether non-Koreans could get phones. And then the KT guy gave me an address in Seoul, a date and time, and told me to pick it up then. Only for me to show up in Seoul, and be told, “But you’re a foreigner. We can’t give you a phone. And you’re not on the list. And foreigners on the list are impossible too, we need to check their credit.” (One presumes foreigners’ credit and Koreans’ credit is on the same system, but apparently one presumes wrong. Also, it takes way longer to sort this crap out for “foreigners,” mainly I think because WRGAF?1)
So I gave up on that, and Miss Jiwaku decided that, since my phone was on its last legs, she’d get one for me under her name. Which means she can’t have one, which is very generous and kind of her. (Though she says she ought not to get one anyway.)
If only there hadn’t been somehting wrong with it. Or if only I’d noticed on the day I got the phone.
Because the thing I’m going to complain about is that the service centers don’t have any damned phones in stock, they have to order them. Which takes, well… they say I’ll get my phone on Friday, if a reboot doesn’t fix the (widely-discussed online, though nobody here seems to have heard of it) camera problem.
And unlike some places, KT doesn’t offer replacement phones for the week. Unlike the Apple stores in most places, you can’t just make an appointment and get it dealt with, a new phone swapped for old in the space of a few minutes. Oh, no. You wait a week, and you are grateful for it.
So if you try to call me this week, I may or may not be phoneless. Till Friday. Because I didn’t immediately test the camera function, and only discovered it after the shop closed on the same day I got it.
Thanks, KT. Even when the workaround sorta works, the consumer experience sucks ass.
1. Who Really Gives A F*ck?