Author Neil Gaiman now lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota. He needed a new phone and thought the G1 might be nice so he headed down to his local T-Mo shop where he found posters advertising the phone and an eager, if slightly dim, staff.
“When will you get them in?”
“We won’t get them in.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Look, are we talking about the same thing? G1 phone. The one on that poster. And that poster. And that one…” The posters were staring at me from the counter. They were all around me.
“No. We won’t sell it. We’re out of the range and the Google and things that the phone comes with, they won’t work on it.”
As we all know, IP packets from Google grow horrible polluted as they travel from California to the East coast. Minneapolis is right in middle of all that mess and, as a result, Google isn’t there.
As you can probably tell this is actually a matter of an uneducated sales staff. But sadly they ran into Neil Gaiman, who is pretty educated. The collision of their intellects created this horrible black hole of ignorance that is now being heard around the world.
Hilarious!…T-mobile’s strategy is such a mystery…same thing happened to me when I went to a local “official” T-mobile store…big assed posters!….3 displays!….and the rep had a working model in his hand…(knowing that there arent any in stores in the non 3g network cities) I asked anyway…got the same answer!…I’ts sad when I’M more versed on the phone (by using the internet) than someone that works for the company.
I wonder which T-mobile store he went to — he lives in a small Wisconsin town about an hour east of the Twin Cities (and about twenty minutes west of me, actually), and they don’t have a direct dealer in that town (just an authorized retailer there).
If it was an authorized retailer, then lord knows what’s actually going on there. They might just be hanging up whatever signage they could get their hands on.