It's the last day before the National Holiday week and I have to cancel my pay-as-you-go contract with Chinacom. Yes I know. "Pay-as-you-go contract" makes no sense.: "Because China."
Anyway. Into the phone shop, sit down and start the process.
"You need passport" says phone-shop-man
I've seen it happen where you just say that you don't have your passport with you and the seeming document necessity evaporates.
"I don't have my passport. It's in my hotel" I said looking phone-shop-man in the eye.
"You need passport to cancel phone" phone-shop-man replied, sticking to the passport rule and holding the gaze.
"You in Rayfont (my hotel)?" asked phone-shop-man.
"We cancel now and go with you" he added before I could confirm my hotel situation.
He was actually offering to send one of the other phone-shop-men with me to my hotel.
That was an unexpected bit of lateral thinking. I would see where this would go.
Probably my hotel.
The sim card was disabled within 30 seconds.
I was refunded 63 Yuen and phone-shop-man grabbed one of the younger phone-shop-men and sent the two of us on our way.
I walked the ten minutes to my hotel.
Phone-shop-man#2 followed a respectful 10 feet behind me.
Into the lift and up to the 36th Floor.
Phone-shop-man#2 waited outside the room while I retrieved my passport, at which point he realized that he had forgotten his phone, so I took a picture of my passport with my phone.
Second point of failure: I remembered that phone-shop-man#1 had disabled my sim. No dice there.
VPN was the next choice, but because Hong Kong was "definitely not" having any political problems at this time, that wasn't working either.
Finally, I added phone-shop-man#2 to my WeChat friends and was able to send him the passport picture.
WeChat by the way is China's answer to SMS, Facebook, match.com, and uber-taxi all rolled into one.
Contract cancelled.
TL/DR:
You really do need your passport for some things in China.
Phone-shop-man#2 is now my WeChat friend.
I have a weird sense of closure.
No comments:
Post a Comment