Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Experience Kenya but Activate Your Patience Before You Activate Your Cell Phone

As Walter Cronkite may have said, “Today was a day like all days, except you were there”.

Ding, ding, 7:11 – you’ve won.  That’s what we could have believed when messages came in on both our cell phones as we lay half asleep in bed at 7:11 a.m. today.   Who could be leaving us a message at this time?  Did we win the lottery?  Was it our driver, Chris, who was to pick us up at 9 and take us to the David Sheldrick Wildlife (elephant and rhino) Trust on the other side of Nairobi?  Was he going to be late?  Was he going to show up at all?  It must be important if someone sent a message to both of us at the same time.  Check that message now!

 

“Dear customer, for legal reasons, your number will be suspended until you complete the registration.    For more information visit any Safaricom shop.” 

 

We did that yesterday, twice, or was that thrice?   We’ll go to the main Safaricom office downtown on the way back from the Trust.  It won’t take more than a couple of minutes to straighten this out.

 

The Wildlife Trust was fascinating as usual.  Twenty-five baby elephants drank milk, ate special foliage, and played with each other just for our enjoyment.   Kainuk and her very best friend, Trukwell, were among the twenty-five, but within the week, they and Kanjuro will be shipped off in a special truck for release into the semi-wild at Tsavo East.   In fact, they practice eating in the stationary truck with their keepers nearby so they get accustomed to the space and are ready to go when the day arrives.

 

Now for Safaricom!  We were right, it only took a few minutes.  A fellow behind a desk took our names, numbers, etc. as we had supplied just yesterday in writing and on the phone.  He entered the data into a computer and pronounced us whole.  We would have full use of our phones within 40 minutes; all we had to do was wait.  Almost immediately we got another text message saying, “Dear customer, you have been registered with success.  Thank you for staying connected to The Better Option.”  We were certain of our success, again.  

Smugly, off we went to the Masai Market just a few blocks away.  We bought more than we needed and quit after an hour or so. 

 

Time to head back to the hotel to get ready for a meeting with our CLOUT counterparts tonight.  But, the 40 minutes had long since passed, so we thought it worthwhile to give the phones a test.  We tried calling each one with the other.  We even tried calling our driver who was sitting right next to us.  Unfortunately, both phones gave the same recorded message -.  “Your phone needs to be activated.  Visit customer service at your nearest Safaricom dealer.” 

 

We had just left there 1.5 hours ago.  But back we went at 2:30 pm.

 

By 5:00 PM we had been shuttled between four individuals, each of whom said they could solve our problem, only to shuttle us off to the next with the problem unsolved.  Most of them asked us to fill out the same registration form we had already completed three times.  What would this accomplish since we had text message confirmation on the phones that showed they were successfully registered?  A couple representatives even told us to come back tomorrow – no way.  Finally, a young woman said she could fix it, went away, fixed it, and came back.  We do not know what she did differently from the others other than to really take our problem as one that needed to be solved, not shunted off.  Praise her and the Lord and damn Safaricom.

Moral: next time you’re in Kenya, activate your patience before you try to activate your cell phone.