Local cell phone number

Hi

As I will be staying here for a while, it's best to have a local cell phone number. And, would figure it's easiest to have a prepaid one as that's easy to get and no hassle. Right?

Well, hell. This is India. Come on. I have already explained what one Finnish girl had to go through here with her cell phone number, but here's how my story has went for me so far:

1. Last Saturday I went to a store to get a Vodafone prepaid. People had already warned me that I need lots of stuff with me so I had all I needed: passport, a picture of myself, certificate from work and some money. After a few photocopies and about five signatures I got the sim card and all was well. As if.
2. On Monday it still didn't work. I went to the store to ask and they told me that it should be 'done' that evening.
3. On Tuesday it worked a bit better. The problem was that I couldn't make any phone calls or send SMS. So, went to the store. There they told me that I also need to charge some money in it. So paying the original 200 rupees obviously didn't include any money for calls/SMS, but nobody bothered to tell me about it earlier. So I charged 100 rupees, of which 14 rupees vanished for some taxes. It seemed to start working.
4. On Wednesday morning my local mom and dad got phone calls from Vodafone (I had been forced to give their phone numbers to Vodafone). They both told me that Vodafone will disconnect my phone if I don't go and give a copy of my passport visa to them. Now what is this, didn't they already take copies of my passport?
5. So, I went to the store again with my passport. I explained the situation to the guy there and after a few phonecalls he assured me that everything is fine. I got the strong impression that he had no idea what I was talking about even though I tried to force the information down to him. Basically at the end of the conversation I told him that I don't believe him, but of course that didn't help much.
6. The same day's afternoon I got a phone call. From Vodafone! They told me that they will disconnect my connection if my visablahblahblah... Surprise! I told them I already visited the store and they said that the guy just didn't know anything of anything at the store earlier. So I went to the store again. They took the copies and I gave some more signatures. And they told me that everything is fine.

Now waiting forward to if this thing works. And continues working.

One interesting thing is that I get advertisements or quiz questions to my phone about once a minute. Which are.. really annoying. Tani told me that I should just get used to them but I refused to. So I called Vodafone. The first time the guy just hung up when I asked if he speaks English. Second time I spent 10 minutes yelling at some other guy about the advertisements and all he could figure out was "so you want to recharge your prepaid?". No.

I gave the phone to my colleague, Amit. He called them and got the same guy. They spoke in Hindi but Amit couldn't understand what on earth the guy was talking about so they agreed that the guy sends the details as an SMS. Well, SMS came, and there was nothing. Amit calls again, spends 15 minutes on phone and finally gets a number where to call for a service called "Do Not Disturb". So that should get activated in 72 hours, let's hope it works. Interesting that I need to order a service to stop receiving crap to my phone (even received phone call advertisements in Hindi).

Oh, and my number. +91967222375X where X is the last digit of my Finnish mobile phone number. I will start using only this number from this evening onwards, so if you want to reach me, contact that number. I need to activate some services (not yet sure how to do that) to be able to call/send SMS abroad, but hopefully I'll manage to do that at some point.