My brain is a blur and I am exhausted. I left SeaTac Airport at 6PM (note: I picked our departure date and time to coincide with the Rapture, somewhat disappointed in the results). I wound up in Melbourne (pronounced Mel-bun) at 10:30AM Monday morning. I had only two objectives on my first day in Australia.
1: Open a bank account. Done.
2: Get an iPhone. Sort of done.
I have been asked a few times why I was selling my phone in the states. I'll try to make this short, as I feel it made a lot of sense. In the US, I bought my phone for $300 and it carried a two year contract with AT&T. The penalty for breaking said contract is $375 pro-rated by the number of months on the contract. Since AT&T doesn't work in Oz, I obviously was going to need to break my contract. At this point, I owed about $200. However, there are plenty of people who want iPhones, but don't want a contract. I'm not sure why (some ship them to India or China where it's hard to get an iPhone and depend on hacker tools to "Jailbreak" and "Unlock" their phones). Regardless, I sold my phone for $500 since the buyer does not assume my contract. I netted $300 out of the five minutes I spent posting an email and negotiating a price. Here in Australia, the phones are thrown in with the contracts and since I plan on being here for at least three years, I figured I'd pick up a new phone, make a decent profit for minimal effort, and not have to depend on hacker tools to keep my phone working.
Now, it's usually not a good idea to start publicly picking on your boss before you start working and it's also usually a good idea to take responsibility for your actions, but I'm going to violate both of those rules with this entry. How I know Mick is a story for another time, but how I'm going to blame Mick for my phone no longer working goes something like this...
Mick had sent me some pictures he had taken from a book because it contained some interesting information. I started to rave about an iPhone app called "JotNot" that takes material from print and allows you to straighten it out so that it looks more like it was scanned than a picture. It really does a superior job of making a photo completely legible and corrects for the angle the phone was held and then enables the user to fax or email the article. What's more, the app costs a whopping $.99. I felt so strongly about this product that I told Mick, "Look, if you don't like it, I'll give you back your ninety-nine cents."
Mick then replied, "Well, it's not really ninety-nine cents because we get screwed on the exchange rate by iTunes. When you come over here, be sure to keep your American credit cards and iTunes account."
"Well then, how much do apps cost over there?", I was worried for a moment.
"We have to pay $1.10 for things that cost $.99!"
In the conversations since then, the subject of this digital exchange rate abuse has come up a few times and yesterday I confronted Mick about it.
"Do you really care about the extra ten cents that things cost you through iTunes? Isn't that just a cost of being an Australian? It seems hardly relevant."
"That's not the point, mate." Yes, Australians really call people mate regardless of whether they are male or female.
Mick was running on a full head of steam. "Why should we have to pay more for a 'digital tax'? It costs the same to download something no matter where you do it. It's just not right."
I gave up. If Mick wanted to hold a grudge over being charged an extra ten cents for an app, that was his propagative and was one of his least eccentric qualities. But... the subject had come up a few times and he had warned me to keep my US address and credit card on my iTunes account to avoid paying this tax...
So Julie and I had our shiny new iPhones and all was well with the universe. We had a great time strolling through a grocery store in our new neighborhood. I took some great pictures of local products like a Kraft Lunchables with Vegemite. I made it a goal to stay up until 8:00PM local time and did it. Unfortunately, I woke up at 4AM. Having nothing better to do, I decided to restore my iPhone that I had dutifully backed up, complete with all of my US information. Halfway through the restore, I realized that I was putting my old phone number and carrier back on my phone and essentially reimaging it to run in the US and no longer had service in Australia. I was cut off from the world again all to save ten cents per app.
I have been warned repeatedly about the high cost of various things Down Under. Rent is high, but I try to compare it to living on the beach in California and it seems about average. Gas is expensive, but I knew the US taxes gas less than other nations. Beer is ridiculously expensive, <sarcasm> so it's a good thing that Aussies don't drink much </sarcasm>, with a six pack costing about $25. I'm going to focus my irritation at the high cost of beer rather than being charged an extra dime to download media from iTunes.
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