After having a second hand iPhone disaster (don’t bother with the second hand phone market in Nanjing) and then having a brand new iPhone stolen, I went to China Telecom and got a proper one. Well that’s what I thought anyhow.
Last week as I was having my feet nibbled by some fish on the beach in Sanya I dropped my phone into the fish tank. I quickly extracted and with the help of two sympathetic Chinese girls, dried it as much as possible but it was dripping with water. I was surprised and delighted to see that almost immediately it was showing signs of life and after a few huors most of the functionality had returned. However there was stilll a part of the screen which was unresponsive to touch.
On returning to Nanjing, I confidently went to the Apple Service Centre at Wanda Plaza and waited in line. When the time came a helpful chap opened up the back on the phone and proclaimed ‘This is an American iPhone so we cannot fix it here’. I explained that I had in fact bought it at China Telecom in Nanjing but he insisted that it was an American phone with a fake back cover to fool the purchaser into thinking it was a Chinese phone. I could only get it fixed in America.
Who was I to argue with the Apple expert? I thanked him and left craddling my malfunctioning iPhone. I was just about to phone a friend for some words of comfort when I noticed that the airplane mode had somehow been activated at the Apple Centre. When I tried to turn it off, I was horrified to find that the on/off button was in the part of the screen which was ‘dead’. No matter how I tried I could not turn it off so was left with a phone which was no better than a music player.
In desperation I tried every button I could in order to activate 3G again and eventually discovered that if I turned on the VPN (which was not in the broken part of the screen) 3G would start up. Thank God.
Now I am left with a iPhone which I cannot load new contacts into, cannot play games properly, cannot turn on/off airplane mode or wifi, cannot send an email, cannot look at Weichat photos, cannot open the first text message in the list and many more functional shortcomings yet to be discovered (discovering more each day!).
Those blasted fish – they have a lot to answer for. And it’s definitely an unnatural thing to do – to stick your feet into a tank of pyrhanas!