This Is America, Right?

After the saga I am about to describe to you, I can't believe that I'm actually in America and not Albania or something.

You see, Agnieszka has a boyfriend Pawel whom she must speak to or be in constant contact with everyday. EVERYDAY! And not just once, no, we're talking 3, 4 times a day. But the problem is, her mobile phone is not quad band - so it is totally useless here in the US. Even with a US sim card, it can not read the signal. My phone can, but it's locked to the 3G network UK, so its of no use to her either. So she bought a cheap pay as you go phone for $15 at Safeway. Of course, the first problem with a new phone is, in order to use it, you must fully charge the battery. But we're camping, and we don't have access to electricity. So we've tried everything - looking for random plugs at the campground loos (but someone might nick it - who wants to sit in a loo for several hours watching a phone charge?), asking the office if they'll charge it (no, they won't) and so on. We even plugged it in at the cafe but weren't able to stay there long enough. So its a big problem.

Until we went to the Visitor Centre at the Grand Canyon - who let her leave it there even though it might get nicked. Ok. Off we went on our hikes.

When we got back, we then tried to activate it. But you can't do that from the actual phone, no, you have to do it from another phone or a landline. So I was given the job of doing this, as the native speaker of English.

Only the whole thing is automated. You have to give response like "yes", "no" or "I'm ready" - only every time I did, the computer went, "I didn't quite catch that". So in the end I hand to bung on my best Yankee to try to be understood. Only then, it wanted your address - a US address. By zipcode. Well, that wasn't going to work, so I gave the only address I could find - that of the pay phone company displayed on a sticker on the payphone I was using. Ok. Moving right along - would you like to top up? Yes, I would - but again you have to give the address the card is registered to - which is a big problem, as it's a UK card. By this point I was ready to rip the phone out of the wall, so I began to punch random keys, and shock of the century, actually got put on to a REAL HUMAN. Result!

You'd think. He still needed a US address. I explained and explained, and eventually he said I could give the address of where I was right now - only I didn't know that address. So I had to run over a few metres to the hotel desk clerk (shouting at some woman nearby "Don't let anyone use that phone!") - and the clerk didn't know the address either! You're kidding me, right?

Some customer she was serving pointed out that it was on the back of the cardboard sleeve she had just given him with the room key - but this wonderful desk clerk couldn't then even find one of the sleeves to give to me. In the end I grabbed the guy's key, wrote out the address myself and ran back to the phone.

The guy accepted the address and credited the phone with $15. Or so he said - for when I went back to Agnieszka and we tried to use it, IT STILL DIDN'T WORK!

In fact, it wasn't until nearly 10 days later in Chicago that the phone happened to work, just by chance, when we popped into Radio Shack to try to get it fixed!

This is America, right? Land of technology, copious wireless notworks and every man and his dog on a cellphone... but heaven help you if you're a foreigner trying to get one...