This is not the first time I've encountered this in the six weeks since I've been here. My company got me a blackberry when I arrived here. I picked Model A and ended up getting Model B. It really didn't matter a whole lot so I didn't say anything. Now Smartone (the carrier we use) came out with a 3G blackberry. I travel to Japan quite often and having a 3G blackberry/phone will be most useful. I asked if I could upgrade to the 3G one from my six-week-old 2G one. Afterall, they did confirm the 3G one wasn't available when my company got my current one for me. I was told No unless the company pays all the penalty and start a new contract. The alternative is to find someone in my firm that would take over my contract. Isn't this this craziest thing? Afterall, I'd only be using way, way, way more minutes if I could use it in Japan and think about all the roaming fees! We have a corporate account with them and we just switched over from CSL, apparently. Like I mentioned, this is not the first time in six weeks that I've encountered how people stick with whatever they are given and don't think out of the box and adapt or accommodate. in the end, they would make more money off of me. So now, I'm going to sign up for a 3G plan on my personal phone since I'm with "3" and they've been calling me to ask me to upgrade. I'll just present all my personal phone bills and get reimbursed by my company (I confirmed they would do that).
One of my HK Chinese friends said that she once called the cable operator and accidentally selected the English menu when she called customer service. She asked if the customer service rep spoke Cantonese and she said yes. My friend thought she could proceed with Cantonese but the rep refused simply because my friend pressed "2" for English by mistake.
I'm originally from HK and grew up here. I don't recall people/businesses being so inflexible before. What happened???