DAT IPHONE THO

My preparations for Europe have gone fairly smoothly thus far; I’ve easily gotten rid of much of my furniture, closed various bank and utility accounts, and signed up for student housing in Dresden. I’ve given away a lot of my clothes, electronics, and kitchenware to friends and the Goodwill. My flatmate is taking over my apartment and is trying to find someone who would be willing to take my big-ass bookcase off my hands. I did try to open a German bank account with DKG, but I was rejected. I figured I might get ahead of the game by having an account ready by the time I got there. The bank has a no fee checking account and some other nice perks. Maybe I’ll check it out again when I get there. Generally, I’ve been feeling *mostly *prepared to make my departure.

Until yesterday.

A friend of mine just moved to Mexico City and told me that Sprint had unlocked his iPhone 5 for him. All he had to do was call them up and then perform a factory reset and then restore on his phone. I thought, "Perfect, I have Sprint, I’ll be totally set". I called Sprint, told them I was moving to Europe and that I wanted my phone unlocked. I was told that they had done something on their end to unlock the phone and that all that remained to do was perform a factory reset and then a restore. They even offered to waive my early termination fee as long as I faxed in proof of my departure. So far, so good. I get home and I perform what I *think *is a factory reset or at least what the Sprint associate meant. Go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings. The phone performs this effortlessly and I’m presented with the brand-new-iPhone welcome screen. I get to the step where it is asking for my zip code and SSN, I enter them correctly, I wait, and it tells me that Sprint couldn’t verify my information. I try again and again, and still nothing. I’m worried by now. I call Apple tech support, which tells me to talk to Sprint customer service. Fuck. I call Sprint and I am connected with a very nice lady and we proceed to troubleshoot my activation problem for almost two hours. We try everything: using wifi, using cellular, putting the phone into recovery mode, but still nothing. Ultimately, she tells me to bring it to an Apple store, which I am doing tonight. I want this resolved badly.

I have a theory about what might have gone wrong. I was originally meant to put the phone into recovery mode to execute the reset and restore, but instead I did the “Erase All blah blah…” thing, which fucked things up. I have no theories of recovery. Ugh.