New Mobile Phone
Your best mate gets a fancy new cellular telephone. You fantasise over its stealth exterior, high-tech touch display and substantial assortment of abilities. They say the cell phone has the capacity to get emails, have apps, they can social network and even make the odd mobile phone call. You glimpse at your own ‘so last year’ telephone and decide that it is socially unacceptable to use it any longer. You realise that they are really costly and your latest model is, after all, only 12 months old. What you need to have is a strategy to justify to your nearest and the dearest why you absolutely, positively have to have the finest mother flippin cell phone in the room!
You begin to casually point out how clunky your old cellphone is, how it never gets reception, how little time the battery power stays charged and how expensive batteries are to replace. You show them the scratches (assisted by the way you have taken to throwing it on the table/desk/ ground lately). You point out that it does not have the newest apps so you were not able to compare the cost of pork scratchings in the local pubs before you went out and so had to go into each and every one to be sure you got the very best deal. You begin to buy gadget magazines and casually leave them lying around open with the object of your desire circled and highlighted.
And then you wait.
Your birthday comes and goes and no one buys you one. As Christmas approaches you increase your endeavours which involves sitting on your old cell phone so that the screen cracks and ignoring your partners text to say they were caught in the bad weather with a flat tyre – blaming bad reception. Christmas goes and there is no cell phone – frankly you have been lucky to get that jumper following the whole flat tyre incident.
Then finally you resort to desperate measures – you accidentally drown your cell phone in a freak sailing accident the very same week as your January bonus comes through and the sales start. By lucky happenstance you just happened to have backed up all your numbers the day earlier.
Finally your day has arrived. You try the first mobile phone shop and they only have it in pink, identical story in the following one, you start to panic. At the following shop they have sold out and at the next one they will only provide it with the £3,000 per month contract. Out of the blue you have an epiphany – going outside to real physical retailers is so 20th Century you ought to be seated or reclined indoors moving only your right and left hands from the elbow down. You go home and buy it online, remembering to uncheck the box that asks if you want to buy mobile phone insurance.
Your new phone arrives through the post. It is in a box roughly the size of a small fridge – you start to panic. Maybe they despatched you the incorrect model and you have something from the 80’s that comes with its own trolley and a wind up handle! You open up the box and there at the top is a tiny stunning black and metalic machine – you start to drool. After fondling your new cell phone for about an hour or so and wiping up the drool you finally investigate what the hell else is in the box. Ah – the handbook.
You flick though the first 300 pages and are dismayed to realise that it is not the multiple language version. You begin from page one – battery power, safety, charging, zzzzzz. You wake up 30 minutes later and peel the instruction manual off your face and wipe up a lot more drool. You determine that manuals are for ladies put the cellphone in your pocket and go to the pub to show off to your mates. You delay so you are fashionably late and everybody else is there and then you stroll in with your cell phone held aloft in triumph. They all laugh and point.
You flee to the loo to cope with your devastation in private. While there you realise they are not laughing at the cell phone but at you as you have pages 6&7 of your mobile phone manual printed across your face. You use your drool to wipe it off – eventually it comes in handy!
Your love affair with your cellphone lasts precisely for 18h 23mins, most of which is spent asleep. You devote the subsequent 2 weeks swearing in and around the vicinity of your phone. The **?/## touch display does not work with your sausage fingers, there are **?/## stupid symbols all over the home page which you can not work out how to get rid of, you cannot use any of your apps primarily because you are not able to work out how to get to them. You can use the digicam and have taken some fantastic photographs and even some video but you have absolutely no idea whatsoever how to move said objects from your mobile phone and get them on to a computer.
You can’t set up email. Intensive research on the web and amongst your social circle reveals that no one has ever before managed to set up their email on their cellphone and you start to suspect a huge conspiracy in the cellular phone industry.
You studiously ignore the dark looks your partner shoots you every time you swear at your cell phone. They start to mutter things which sound a bit like ‘waste of money’ and ‘study the manual’. However these comments have no influence on you what so ever as you are already practiced at selectively tuning out anything your partner says. For example “do the dishes” and “put your stinking soiled pants in the wash basket” are all efficiently tuned out but ”are you ready for the pub” or “I am felling a bit frisky tonight” actually get amplified.
After several weeks you realise that all you use your cell phone for is making & receiving calls, telling the time and setting the alarm. You realise that that is all you have used each and every one of your other mobile phones for and are momentarily baffled as to why you invested all that money on a new one when your old one did that perfectly adequately. You take the mobile phone out of your pocket and lay it on the taxi seat as you ponder its worth. You are so deep in thought that you exit the taxi, walk up the steps and let your self in the flat before you realise that your cellular phone is no longer on your person and is now probably being boxed up for the Taxi drivers spouse’s subsequent birthday.
You curse as you remember that you unchecked the please include mobile phone insurance box when you bought the phone and realise you have exaclty 30 minutes to come up with a brilliant excuse before your partner returns home.