Our First Phone Call

With the establishment of our Yahoo! Voice account we are finally able to make international calls and my first call, since I had already talked to my parents on Skype, was to T-Mobile.

I brought my phone from Atlanta here to Vietnam, no so much because I thought I could use it, but because I want to be able to make calls from the airport before we left the U.S. But upon arriving in Vietnam, I learned that I can use my phone here, I would just have to contact T-Mobile to ask for permission to unlock my phone to other SIM cards. Easier said than done.

Without trekking all the way to the backpackers area in the middle of the night (when T-Mobile would be open in the States), I hadn't discovered any other way to make international calls. Everyone kept saying that they used Skype, but since we weren't able to add any money to our account necessary for PC to Phone calls, we could only call PC to PC. Finally I learned about Yahoo! Voice and after three days of waiting for my credit card to be verified and finally being able to put money on our account, we were set up to make international calls from our computer.

I called T-Mobile's Customer Service number and heard the familiar recorded voice on the line. Since I had no phone to dial numbers (and hadn't yet discovered that I could dial with a virtual keypad on the screen) I just yelled "representative" into my headset until I was put through to Customer Service.

I explained my situation to the woman on the other end of the line and she listened patiently finally explaining that the connection wasn't good and that she could only catch part of what I was saying. She asked me to give her my phone number, but with the spotty connection, 404-543-5381 became "4,4,4,4 yes 4. Zero, Zero. Zero. 4,4." "Ok I've got 404." "Now 5, 5, 5, 5. Yes 5....". It took me a few minutes to get the whole number across, but she was very patient and understanding. She went through some procedural questions about the reason for my request and the length of my stay. Then she asked me for a sixteen digit number on the inside of my phone. "1,1,1,1,ONE. Yes 1...". Finally the transaction was completed and she told me that I should have my password within 24 hours.

The next day, I went with Steven to buy a new SIM card. On Monday, during my break at school, I saw that I had received my password and was finally able insert it and unlock my phone. The first call I made was to Steven and it was so nice to be able to just dial his number and get him on the line. I remarked to Steven that after four and a half years, we were just now having our first cell phone conversation on our very own phones. It was a historical moment. Please welcome Mr. Jenkins to the age of cell phone technology.