Bought a Phone, Sick

The phone Peace Corps gave me is not what I had in the states. They handed me the absolute most basic phone currently available on any market. It can do the basics like calling and texting, par for the course. It also has a flashlight(?!) and radio. Those bonuses aside, it also has an unusable operating system. There's not a dedicated select button, just shoulder buttons that change with the page you're on in the phone. When texting someone the T9 it comes with is always on and unusable, you can switch it off, but have to do so every time you want to text. Also, texting without a Qwerty keyboard, after having one, is grating. I decided to buy a new phone.

Catherine and I arrived at the local SM (Shopping Mall?) with some friends to do some shopping. The ride there was in a Jeepney. The Jeepney is wild and I do not understand how they even exist, but that's for another time. The mall looks just like the ones back home, this one was tall though, rather than spread wide. Music is pumped in and it's rather loud and is more top-40ish. I was on a mission to trade my American dollars into Philippine Pesos and buy a cell phone with what I have from there. The place to get your money converted is in the department store, the Department Store, that's the actual name of the store. Catherine and I did just that and started to look around the SM for a new phone. Poor Catherine didn't need and phone and was friendly enough to suffer the experience of my shopping. 

After forty minutes of walking up and down stairs, staring into American-looking-but-not-quite-the-same stores, we found a store with some phones in my price range. The brand I was looking at was ePhone, and it's as nice as you imagine. I pointed to a phone I liked, one with a Qwerty keyboard, albeit BlackBerry style (not prefered, but what I could afford). The friendly woman behind the counter began to “show” me the phone. Here's what was shown:

-It turned on (nice!)

-Its earbuds work (I don't care about/intend to use this fact. I did care about putting earbuds the sales lady just had in her head, into mine.)

-It has a TV antenna, that extends, and swivels.(Why?)

-It shows snowy TV.

-The phone cannot charge.

Oh no! The nice sales people rushed around, trying to solve the issue. At this point we'd been in the store for twenty minutes, the TV expo took eighteen of those minutes. Finally the sales people gave up and asked me to pick a different phone, they tried to up sell me. The second phone they handed me was not to my liking, so I selected yet a third phone, a brown one.

Brown is important because the phone has to appear not worth stealing. Thankfully the operating system provides a back up disincentive, by being awful too. I did buy it, for a cool 2,890 Pesos, about $60, and it still had a Qwerty keypad. The purchase took about an hour, they tried to reshow me the features of the phone, it's almost exactly the same as the first, but I quickly shut that idea down. I'd seen a frozen yogurt place on the way and had every intention of going there, time was short, so the second phone feature presentation was curtailed. Except for to see if the charger worked, I'm not crazy.

Check out the game description of Tetris on my new phone, informative!

The next day (today) I got diarrhea, had a foggy-to-splinting headache, and found myself freezing for no good reason. Thanks Malaria prophylaxis or frozen yogurt or whatever caused this. I feel better now though.