Cell phones, Banking and Internet shopping in Turkey (PART 1 of 199)

It’s been a while since my last post, it is not because I have not being doing anything but things have been rather difficult. I am trying to get a cellphone. First people said that I can use my cellphone from USA – it needs to be “adjusted” to the Turkish system and then it will be just fine. Anybody can adjust it which means some sort of code is written for it to overwrite whatever code it has in its memory. Kinda like rebooting your computer. Or at least this is how I understood it. Well, I could not find someone to do this easily because it is illegal, I had to register the cellphone as I was entering Turkey blah blah blah… I could go to some less law abiding neighborhoods but with three kids in tow I did not want to create unnecessary problems. So I decided to get a new cellphone and sign up with a Turkish carrier; my small survey of friends and family told me pretty much the same thing: all of the carriers suck. Nobody was really happy with what they had. So I went to a cellphone shop. There are two type of plans: one that is billed to your address and one is pay as you go. I of course want to get a plan that gets billed to my address… Which turns out impossible at this point of my life in Istanbul. They need a bank statement or some sort of bill that has my name and address on it. I don’t have anything like that. Logic says cell phone companies have no trust in their customers. I decided to hold off to get a cellphone.
Next on my list was to purchase plane tickets for Antalya. THY has a wonderful website where you can purchase tickets online. Great! So I got them and I did not even have to pay right then, they actually give you 3-5 days to finalize the purchase. You have two options: pay with credit card or pay with EFT (money transfer from your bank account). Since I did not have a Turkish credit card yet I chose to use the EFT option. I logged onto my bank account online – this action takes about 10 minutes because you have to enter your user code (which is given to you by the bank and it has 15 digits or something like that – no way to memorize it), then your password #1 and password #2. The last one is also 10 digits long and you enter the letters and numbers on a keyboard that appears on your screen and every time you enter a letter it scrambles the whole keyboard again. All this craziness is to prevent hackers, so logic says the best hackers reside in Turkey. ANYWAY, I did all of this, and found the screen to give directions for my EFT, entered account number of THY, address etc etc and pushed OK. I got a message saying that it cannot be processed because I do not have a GSM (cellphone) number registered with my account. I spent another 20 minutes or so trying to figure out where I can update my account information and concluded finally that I have to call the bank. You cannot update any personal info online unless you have a registered GSM number with the bank so I was definitely in a Catch 22 situation. So I called, I explained the situation and gave the rep my mom’s cell number. She said that it is registered to someone else’s (my mom) name. I said that she is my mom. Then she asked what my father’s name was, but she did not like my answer. Maybe she was asking for my mother’s father’s name, I don’t know. She politely told me that she cannot verify me as the account owner and the best thing I can do is to go to the bank.
Next day after various phone calls and faxes I was able to add the stupid cell phone number to my account and finalized the EFT and spent a peaceful rest of the day away from banks and internet. Friday afternoon, I was informed via e-mail that my reservation got cancelled because I did not pay. THY’s customer service rep quickly pointed out that it was an internet/IT issue and therefore I should call “them”. But of course they only work 9AM to 5PM Mon through Fri and it was past their office hours. So I asked her that I still needed these tickets and what I should do and she said she really cannot help me with it. Frust frust!!

Excerpts from my Monday morning phone call with the THY IT guy:

- I paid for these tickets via EFT, I can send you the proof.
- But you entered an incorrect explanation code
- I copied and pasted the code you gave me
- But some of the digits became stars…Our system does not recognize stars.
- You can now tell your system what the stars are supposed to be, right?
- No. Once a payment is rejected we cannot assign it to a transaction.
- So you are telling me that I need to pay again for these tickets?
- Yes. And do not use EFT. Your bank might screw it again.
- My bank?? (I cannot believe I am defending my bank but…)

This is how it all ended: I did not need those tickets anyway, I had to get new tickets. I had to travel to city center with three kids in tow to get paper tickets. I had to use my Amex to pay for these tickets. And THY returned my initial payment to me after 4 business days. Case closed – lesson learned.