Thursday, July 22, 2010

China - Day 35 - Phone issues finally resolved

What's been going on this week? Not much. I finally got the issues with my phone resolved. I could receive text messages and phone calls, but I couldn't make them. I visited a China Mobile store 3 times to try to resolve the issue, but I was unsuccessful and frustrated each time. Whenever I tried to make a call there was a message telling me that I needed to register for international calling, which I thought must be an error in my account that wouldn't let me make calls. Well, I was wrong. It turns out that there is a setting on the Blackberry 9700 for "smart dialing" that automatically appends a +1 and area code to any phone number that doesn't already have one. Well, I didn't know about this, so it looked like every call I tried to make to China was attempting to be routed to California, hence the failure. After figuring this out, I felt like a jackass for being so stubborn with China Mobile, but I'm glad I didn't raise my voice at any one or cause a scene, so I can save at least some face.

In less embarrassing news, my company is going to be playing a basketball game against the Xiasha police next week and I've been drafted to play. Our team has a practice tonight at some middle school. I'm not sure how good I'll be in practice if we're running drills, but if we just play 5 on 5, I'll be fine. There are some things that need no translation and basketball is one of them. In other work related news, I've spent the better part of the last week manually writing machine code for milling operations. It's incredibly tedious, but I understand why Michael is having me do it. Although I will admit that the tedium makes it difficult for me to motivate myself to do it, knowing that it will not be read by anyone or used in production. Michael said that we'd be machining the fixture for this workpiece either this Saturday or Monday, so I'm excited to see that happen. I hope they let me help set it up, even if it's just attaching fixturing.

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