How to repair an $8,000 cell phone

Yes Mitch Corber can fix your $8,000 cell phone

   Mitch Corber and I both have experience in the phone business.
  Mine was gained back in the rotary-phone era, when the technology was one step up from a blanket.
   I spent the summer of '85 at Bell Canada toiling away at Services Speciaux connecting mobile phone calls.
   Each car phone call had to be manually connected with cords and a switchboard and timed with an old fashioned stamp on paper.
   We'd have to fill out a relatively-long cardboard form in pencil, a task that usually lasted longer than the actual call, which usually consisted of some variation of "Je suis en route."
   Thanks to this, in my eyes mobile phones will always seem a toy for a small elite of well-heeled bigshots.
   Corber, meanwhile, works in an entirely different world of cell phones, as he runs a place on Decarie called Mobile Montreal, where he does all sorts of cell phone service for riff-raff and rich alike, with quite a lot of cell phone unlocking going on.
    He told me a story which shows that there is still a small number of people who want their cell phone experience to be of a higher-class variety.
   A valued customer came in with a broken phone that cost him $8,000 purchased new. He wanted it repaired.
   The phone, called a Virtu Ascent X, is a high-end Nokia, and apparently made of titanium.
   Yes, apparently there are people in Montreal with $8,000 cell phones.
    Corber inquired all over and was eventually directed to a downtown jewelry store as the only place that could repair this precious phone.
    The store warned him that the phone's one year warranty had elapsed and it would cost him $1,500 to fix.
    He bit the bullet and paid up but when he got it back, he learned that the password was lost. It's usually an easy problem to solve but, hey this is a fancy phone.
   So now at his wits end Corber called the head office in Toronto and learned that the phone had been under warranty the whole time.
  Corber called back the jewelry store and mentioned that the repair should have been free.
   Everybody at this plush jewelry shop which sells $100,000 watches, hung up on him.
   The moral of the story is that Biggie was right about More money, more problems, but perhaps more valuable: take that warranty and pin it right on your bulletin board or wherever else you keep such things, you'll surely need it.