It All Goes Sour

Well, I had a terrifying experience today. I got locked out of my WeChat account. If you read my last post, you will know that WeChat is a phone app and is the vital blood that this entire society runs on, and getting locked out, or losing your phone, or even having your phone run dry, basically strands you without access to transportation, food, or the ability to move around.

And it just happened to me!

Unlike what I misremembered in my last post, when I created my WeChat account, I was actually in Maine, and so I used my US phone number and got the SMS message with the verification code. Now that I’m here in China, I have a new China Mobile SIM card, so I wanted to change the number associated with my WeChat so that I would get notifications. Unfortunately, it required getting another verification code, but of course my US number doesn’t work here. So the workaround, as proposed by everyone in my office, was to just create a brand new WeChat account, linked to my Chinese phone number, and all my data will transfer over since it is validated by the same passport numbers.

Easy cheesy, right?

Not so easy. In order to create the new WeChat account, I had to log off the old one. Then I went about creating the new account, but when I put in my new Chinese phone number, it said there was already a WeChat account associated with that number! Of course, phone numbers are recycled here, and apparently someone in the past had this number, and while they cancelled their phone account (therefore releasing the number for me to use), they didn’t cancel their WeChat account.

No worries…I just had to reconnect to my old WeChat account (so I could travel) and go to the phone company and get a different SIM card.

However, I had forgotten my WeChat password. Gulp! Best to click that little “forgot your password?” link.

I went through the steps to change my password, and the last step was to get the verification code…sent to my US number, that no longer works in China! Gulp!

However, WeChat nicely had a little link that said “Unable to receive SMS messages on this number?” and I clicked that. It asked for a Chinese number that I had access to where they could send the SMS, so I put in my new Chinese number…fingers crossed.

Network error.

So I closed my VPN and tried again. I got a message saying ‘Reply to this message to verify authentication code’, so I did.

Message Did Not Send

So I turned on the VPN and tried again. Message sent, but…

Network Busy, Try Again Later

So I turned off the VPN and tried again.

Too Many Attempts. Account Locked, Try Again Later

Oh my GOD. I was now locked out of my old WeChat account, and unable to create a new account. The story actually gets MUCH much more involved than this but you get the drift. At one point, there was me, my Tech Director, my comrade Tech Coach, the network manager, the HR agent who I have been working with, and a woman at the phone company all working together to try to solve this problem. We tried six different ways to restore or migrate WeChat, including downloading new apps, swapping out with one of their SIM cards, using two phones to bounce messages around…we were very creative, and very unsuccessful. Technology is an ass!

In the end, after about 4 hours and a LOT of different failed strategies, the HR agent and the lady at the Phone Company managed to get me access to my Green Code, by creating a new WeChat account using an account borrowed from the phone company that is good for 24 hours. By this time tomorrow, they will have disconnected my new Chinese number from that mystery WeChat account and I should be able to move my number over…but for a while there, it was seriously looking like I was going to have to sleep in my new office. I could not even get back into my hotel without a green code, and my daily Covid test could not be renewed.

Anyway, disaster narrowly averted, but wow was that scary!!