Apple + China Mobile = Pain

I bought a cell phone when I first got here. A little non-descript phone that ran on the China Mobile network. Like most cell phones (and everything else for that matter) here, it is pay as you go. The only problem is that trying to check your balance on the thing involves calling a hotline and going through a series of instructions that is harder to comprehend than Chinese algebra. So I figured as long as I could call people and they could call me, I had minutes. This was seemingly confirmed one Sunday a few weeks back when I got an error message trying to call someone and had to buy more minutes. No problem. Then a few days ago, my boss Dr. Yu, and I were playing air hockey when the puck soared off the table and hit me squarely in the leg. This was too much for my little phone and her screen cracked right down the middle. A phone is a constant necessity here and being without is not a possibility here. I didn't have the financial means to fix this one or buy a new one, so I asked the technical guru, Ray, here if he could "unlock" my American iPhone to work on the China Mobile network and still continue to buy minutes. Ray was able to do this in about a day's time (something Apple once proudly proclaimed was impossible to do) and then when I synched it to my iTunes on my computer, I found a little jewel that the nice people at Apple had put in for people like me. iTunes has a "security patch" that goes into your iPhone and identifies whether its been unlocked or not. If it has, it immediatly kills the phone capabilities. Thanks a lot, Apple. So this was a problem for a while, until Ray fixed it again (again, considered impossible by Apple at one time). Now I should have a great working iPhone again on the China Mobile network with plenty of minutes. This is where China Mobile comes in and tag teams me along with Apple to ruin my day. Minutes are sold in fifty yuan increments and then after you use them China Mobile is glad to let you go into the negatives (without telling you) and then just take out what you owe them the next time you buy minutes. So thus, I was over 100 yuan into negatives when I was able to check my balance today. How I found this lovely piece of information out was I bought two fifty yuan phone minute cards and expecting my balance to be somewhere near, oh I don't know, a hundred, it was five. five minutes. So i spent another fifty yuan and this time it's at 55 which is enough to last for a few weeks. Hopefully.