Sunday, February 21, 2010

Globe's SIM Replacement

A month ago, all of a sudden, right in the middle of the day, on a weekend, my phone's display suddenly was displaying "Invalid SIM" instead of the Operator name. I'm not getting any signal. I called Globe Hotline and I was told I had to go to a Business center to have the SIM replaced. Without further arguments I conceded and waited for my duty to be over (that's around 24 hrs of me not having a phone).

So the afternoon of the next day, went to Globe Greenbelt Business Center, I told them about what happened and they agreed that the SIM really needs replacing...but I have to pay P300 as a SIM replacement fee. So I asked the girl in the counter the reason why a subscriber has to pay such fees when it's not his fault that the SIM broke and I also asked why will a SIM card break when it has no moving parts. She said it's because of wear and tear...hmmmm that sounds fishy, from what I know, a SIM can only be worn out if one keeps on removing and re-inserting the SIM, in my case i don't, I don't replace my handsets that often, the most frequent time I've changed handset (and thus touching the SIM) was 1 year. So I questioned the girls claims, I also said that there is no provision in the contract that subscribers have to pay for replacement SIMs. With this, I guess she felt I was becoming agitated and she called her direct supervisor (i think) for help. 

I was told by the supervisor of the same things (good thing I've read earlier about SIMs being mailed by Globe to subscribers to change their 64k SIMs to 128k SIMs), again, I've raised my point. And another thing came up, the wife's SIM was as old as mine though it hasn't conked out yet. So I told her that if she's going to replace my SIM, might as well replace her SIM as well, since we're already there to avoid us being more inconvenieced then the time comes that her SIM breaks down. At first she resisted replacing my SIM for free and replacing the wife's SIM at that moment...but I stool my ground and finally our SIM cards were replaced.

I was wondering why subscribers are asked to pay for replacement SIMs and at that price! Heck they're virtually giving SIMs away in the prepaid market and now Globe is asking us to pay for the SIM which broke down for unknown reason. Tsk tsk not a good way to show your subscribers how you take care of them Globe! Tsk tsk tsk