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Ketai Conundrum
Apr. 26th, 2008 08:32 pmMan, creating custom ringtones is just WAY too much fun.
We did, finally, get ketai, aka cell phones. It was more of a process than I'd expected, honestly, even realizing that it was probably going to be tricky. First, of course, we had to get our alien registration cards, or as I've been referring to them, gaijin kaado, and we couldn't pick those up until Wednesday. Then we had to go and negotiate the stores...
Keleih and I went on Thursday, since we didn't have any classes. We actually ended up getting distracted, because we went to cut through the depaato to get to the other side of the station (where Yamada Denki, the electronics store, is), and lo! We saw a sign! A sign saying that the very nice yukata, which we'd been admiring for some time, were on sale. So, why not investigate?
It turned out the yukata were on sale for only 1900 en! And they had obi on sale as well for only about 1000 each. This was a fantastic deal, since the same items usually went for as much as 5000 ($50) or more normally. So we ended up buying some-- mine is a really cool purple with a pattern of dots in yellow and orange (with a yellow-orange obi to match), and it cost us only $32 or so, which again, was amazing, considering it probably would have cost us $100 or more without the sale. Fantastic!
Anyway, we eventually made it over to Yamada Denki, where we browsed the phones as best we could (since we couldn't read the signs completely), and then tried to talk to the saleswoman. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I didn't understand everything that she was saying... it didn't help that the store was blasting extremely loud announcements over the intercom every few minutes, so I could barely hear myself think. She wasn't making a great attempt to explain anything either, though. I would ask a question in fumbling Japanese (since, skilled though I may be, I do not possess the vocabulary to discuss the details of a cell phone contract) and she'd respond rapid-fire, with fistfuls of words that I just didn't know. We did get an English copy of the plan details, but it didn't help much. Eventually we gave up and left.
We stopped again at a smaller ketai shop in the station, and the people there were more friendly and helpful, but we still couldn't get answers to all our questions (What the hell are packets? What was the difference between full support course and single support course? Why was there no student discount despite it being advertised everywhere?) and again, we had to return home empty-handed (except for the kimono).
On Saturday, I was IMing Yoshiko for details about karaoke later in the evening, and telling her some of our cell-phone woes, and she agreed to meet us and help us out. So we met her around noon at the station, and took a taxi over to a smaller (and supposedly cheaper) shop that she knew. Yoshiko talked with the saleswoman while we browsed phones. Here almost all the phones are free if you start a new contract, so we basically got our pick of the lot, and even the older phones here are at least twice as nice as the ones common in the US. I was eyeing a rather shiny phone, which had a purple-blue metallic front that actually changed colors as you turned it, but ended up settling for a black phone with a more curved design and which had a customizeable cover-- you could either pay extra for an official design, or you could put in something of your own under a clear cover. Keleih got a rather cute phone in pink and black-- although hers did not have the English menu, as she found out to her dismay later.
After a bit more browsing, we sat down to negotiate the contract. I was so glad we opted to bring Yoshiko with us. I wouldn't have understood half the things. As it turned out, we were right to be a little confused-- it seems that the three major companies recently changed their policies, which Yoshiko hadn't known. Whereas before you could simply save up points and switch out phones every few months, now you have to stick with a phone at least a year. (This wasn't surprising to me, since I've always had phones at least two years, and terrible phones at that, but Yoshiko was quite disappointed.) Basically, you have to either pay for the cost of the phone and then only pay $30 to cancel early, or get a free phone and pay a fee to cancel, which is about $120. Something like that. However, if you get the Full Support Course (which is a 2-year contract), they essentially give you $60 worth of points free. I also got another free $100 worth of points because I'm under 22. So I'll have to pay the cancellation fee, since I'll be here far less than two years. But since they've given me more than enough free money to cover it, I don't mind too much.
In the end, we picked out a pretty simple, cheap plan. For $23 a month, I get 60 minutes of speaking time. (This is why everyone texts here; calling is hella expensive). Then there's a sort of text/internet insurance, where we paid $3 a month. Depending on how much we use the internet, the bill will be at least $10 a month, but never any more than $40 (a good thing, since Yoshiko says it's quite easy to spend several hundred dollars' worth of online time and e-mails). Brian says his phone bill evens out to about $40 a month, which is about what I was expecting. And hey, it's a good phone! I get internet, e-mail, text, music and video downloads (which I can then port to the computer), and even free TV-- if we can get the signal, which apparently in Oyama you can't, but oh well.
The contract still took forever to finish though. It took probably 45 minutes to fill out the forms, and then they told us to wait for half an hour while they did whatever they needed to file it.
We went and had lunch, then came back. They were not yet quite ready.
So what really should have been a simple process took about three hours, but... well, at least we got our phones. I quickly set to work customizing mine. I have a photo background for the idle screen, a tiny little animation of a cat that plays when I close the phone... custom weather forecasts on the screen...
Now I'm working on custom ringtones. Brian gave me a program that converts .wav files into .mmf's, and between that and Audacity, I've been spending a fair amount of time toying with sounds. I now have ringtones created from the Doctor Who theme, the "Kaneda" track from Akira, L's theme from Death Note, and Tsugaru, from DDR. I've also got some very short clips for e-mail received tones and things (mostly from Okami).
The only thing I need to do now is find a way to print color pictures so I can get a custom design on the front, and then get my internet to work... for some reason it won't, and that is a shame, especially since I'm still stuck one or two days a week with no access to campus and no internet here.
We did, finally, get ketai, aka cell phones. It was more of a process than I'd expected, honestly, even realizing that it was probably going to be tricky. First, of course, we had to get our alien registration cards, or as I've been referring to them, gaijin kaado, and we couldn't pick those up until Wednesday. Then we had to go and negotiate the stores...
Keleih and I went on Thursday, since we didn't have any classes. We actually ended up getting distracted, because we went to cut through the depaato to get to the other side of the station (where Yamada Denki, the electronics store, is), and lo! We saw a sign! A sign saying that the very nice yukata, which we'd been admiring for some time, were on sale. So, why not investigate?
It turned out the yukata were on sale for only 1900 en! And they had obi on sale as well for only about 1000 each. This was a fantastic deal, since the same items usually went for as much as 5000 ($50) or more normally. So we ended up buying some-- mine is a really cool purple with a pattern of dots in yellow and orange (with a yellow-orange obi to match), and it cost us only $32 or so, which again, was amazing, considering it probably would have cost us $100 or more without the sale. Fantastic!
Anyway, we eventually made it over to Yamada Denki, where we browsed the phones as best we could (since we couldn't read the signs completely), and then tried to talk to the saleswoman. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I didn't understand everything that she was saying... it didn't help that the store was blasting extremely loud announcements over the intercom every few minutes, so I could barely hear myself think. She wasn't making a great attempt to explain anything either, though. I would ask a question in fumbling Japanese (since, skilled though I may be, I do not possess the vocabulary to discuss the details of a cell phone contract) and she'd respond rapid-fire, with fistfuls of words that I just didn't know. We did get an English copy of the plan details, but it didn't help much. Eventually we gave up and left.
We stopped again at a smaller ketai shop in the station, and the people there were more friendly and helpful, but we still couldn't get answers to all our questions (What the hell are packets? What was the difference between full support course and single support course? Why was there no student discount despite it being advertised everywhere?) and again, we had to return home empty-handed (except for the kimono).
On Saturday, I was IMing Yoshiko for details about karaoke later in the evening, and telling her some of our cell-phone woes, and she agreed to meet us and help us out. So we met her around noon at the station, and took a taxi over to a smaller (and supposedly cheaper) shop that she knew. Yoshiko talked with the saleswoman while we browsed phones. Here almost all the phones are free if you start a new contract, so we basically got our pick of the lot, and even the older phones here are at least twice as nice as the ones common in the US. I was eyeing a rather shiny phone, which had a purple-blue metallic front that actually changed colors as you turned it, but ended up settling for a black phone with a more curved design and which had a customizeable cover-- you could either pay extra for an official design, or you could put in something of your own under a clear cover. Keleih got a rather cute phone in pink and black-- although hers did not have the English menu, as she found out to her dismay later.
After a bit more browsing, we sat down to negotiate the contract. I was so glad we opted to bring Yoshiko with us. I wouldn't have understood half the things. As it turned out, we were right to be a little confused-- it seems that the three major companies recently changed their policies, which Yoshiko hadn't known. Whereas before you could simply save up points and switch out phones every few months, now you have to stick with a phone at least a year. (This wasn't surprising to me, since I've always had phones at least two years, and terrible phones at that, but Yoshiko was quite disappointed.) Basically, you have to either pay for the cost of the phone and then only pay $30 to cancel early, or get a free phone and pay a fee to cancel, which is about $120. Something like that. However, if you get the Full Support Course (which is a 2-year contract), they essentially give you $60 worth of points free. I also got another free $100 worth of points because I'm under 22. So I'll have to pay the cancellation fee, since I'll be here far less than two years. But since they've given me more than enough free money to cover it, I don't mind too much.
In the end, we picked out a pretty simple, cheap plan. For $23 a month, I get 60 minutes of speaking time. (This is why everyone texts here; calling is hella expensive). Then there's a sort of text/internet insurance, where we paid $3 a month. Depending on how much we use the internet, the bill will be at least $10 a month, but never any more than $40 (a good thing, since Yoshiko says it's quite easy to spend several hundred dollars' worth of online time and e-mails). Brian says his phone bill evens out to about $40 a month, which is about what I was expecting. And hey, it's a good phone! I get internet, e-mail, text, music and video downloads (which I can then port to the computer), and even free TV-- if we can get the signal, which apparently in Oyama you can't, but oh well.
The contract still took forever to finish though. It took probably 45 minutes to fill out the forms, and then they told us to wait for half an hour while they did whatever they needed to file it.
We went and had lunch, then came back. They were not yet quite ready.
So what really should have been a simple process took about three hours, but... well, at least we got our phones. I quickly set to work customizing mine. I have a photo background for the idle screen, a tiny little animation of a cat that plays when I close the phone... custom weather forecasts on the screen...
Now I'm working on custom ringtones. Brian gave me a program that converts .wav files into .mmf's, and between that and Audacity, I've been spending a fair amount of time toying with sounds. I now have ringtones created from the Doctor Who theme, the "Kaneda" track from Akira, L's theme from Death Note, and Tsugaru, from DDR. I've also got some very short clips for e-mail received tones and things (mostly from Okami).
The only thing I need to do now is find a way to print color pictures so I can get a custom design on the front, and then get my internet to work... for some reason it won't, and that is a shame, especially since I'm still stuck one or two days a week with no access to campus and no internet here.
