Mobile Phone Hell and a New Trench

We're in London, continues...

Yesterday John and I bought UK iPhones. We love our U.S. iPhones so of course we want them here too. We went to the O2 store to buy them.

Our existing mobile phones are a different company so we had to get a pac code from our provider to move our numbers. I expected that they would freak out when we said we wanted to cancel our accounts, all service companies go nuts when you try to do that. John had an easier time of it than I did. The customer service guy I got kept offering me upgrade options for my existing account. Finally I told him I was starting to get upset and please just give me the pac code immediately. He finally did. Whew.

Then John and I went to iTunes to activate our iPhones and open O2 accounts. Nope. I figured there was a 50/50 chance it wouldn't work because nothing ever does.

After a fruitless and frustrating re-visit to the O2 store we decided to try to open O2 accounts by calling them on the phone. John agreed to do the calling because at this point I was seriously fed up and pissed off. After several recordings passed him around and gave him various other numbers to call, he finally got a customer service person on the phone. They told him that there was a problem verifying some banks in the iPhone activation and he gave John some fake bank info that would get the phone activated which we could then change to our actual information afterward.

It worked.

We activated our phones, then logged onto the web site, got our verification codes by SMS and changed our bank info. Fabulous!

Meanwhile, our street is still closed off for the water main replacement. The trench in front of our house that our friends had sent us photos of while we were way has now been filled in, and a new trench (see below) further up the street is now under way. They only have a half block to go before they finish our street but at the rate they are working, drinking tea and reading the newspaper (not in that order), it could take a while. The construction has been going on since September. That's a lot of tea. '-)

Then last night we went to dinner at, ta da: Moti Mahal, at last. I had been dreaming of it for weeks. It was amazing. We had pink champagne. Yay, we're in London!

P.S. We did manage to get two kinds of Robitussin so we're both feeling a lot better, yay.