You’re not even right. You are genuinely activating the SIM card and anyone around you paraphrasing to “activating a phone” is also correct, because nobody cares what other meaning you personally wish to ascribe to the task.

That’s not really how this works

The better analogy is that people live in houses and houses have addresses, and I can use an address to find someone’s house.

Whether the pointed data by the pointer is valid or not is… not the point. In all languages I can think of, dereferencing an invalid pointer like a pointer to the wrong address per the type and alignment is never valid. Your analogy does not improve on historical analogies and it is wrong.