It is only 6am, and my head is already buzzing...!!
It seems my mother's mobile handset is no longer cool - even for a 65 year old. All her friends have newer, smaller, lighter models apparently - supplied by family members who have themselves had upgrades. Whether any of the said friends are actually able to see - or work - these new handsets, she hasn't actually said...
Now, inadvisedly I'm sure, I've always had contract mobiles - so I'm just assuming that the theory is the same with pay as you go handsets. You charge the new handset, get it unlocked if it is designed to be used with a different network from the one you normally use, swap the SIM cards, and away you go basically - am I right?
And if you want to keep your original phone number - which I can guarantee you my mum will, you have to ring your network for some number that I can't even recall the name of, right?
You see, one of the reasons I have a contract phone is, they do all this stuff for you! Because I just don't understand all this at all!!
Unfortunately, knowing that doesn't stop my mother expecting me to be able to advise her - and all I can really say is, 'we'll take it to the shop'!
I'm very much an 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' sort of guy you see. All those folk out there claim to be totally committed to recycling - but not, it seems, to mobile handsets which, so far as I can see, they change every five minutes...
The fact that the last time something went wrong she took it back to the shop for repair - and ever since, has suspected the handset that was returned isn't the same one that was deposited, really doesn't help - it could only happen to my mother!!
Anyway, it occured to me the other day that Winnie - an old lady at church - had given me two new mobile handsets a few months back, despite my best protests that I didn't need them. Not only that, but also a camera and MP3 player - and I can't work them, either! Hence they've all sat in their boxes, in the back of my cupboard ever since - I'd all but forgotten about them, and indeed only found them whilst looking for something else the other day...
(At 82, Winnie's expectations of my ability to understand what all these things are for - let alone how to work them - are even worse than my mother's. She keeps arriving with CD-ROM drivers and manuals, insisting I take them because I have a computer. I just can't get her to understand that they're absolutely no use unless you want to use the appliance they refer to with your computer, and that they're no use otherwise. But, as far as she's concerned, I have a computer and she hasn't, so they're more likely to be of some use to me...).
So, the upshot is that both new handsets are now charged - I did that overnight. Neither will so much as turn on without spending several hours browsing through instructions - that I really don't have; and of course, neither are on my mother's (Virgin) network so far as I can make out - though one of them seems to be locked in German language anyway - so I've not a clue what it says!!
"So why doesn't she just change over to one of the other networks," I hear you say. "What's so special about Virgin?"
Well, she has £27 credit on her existing handset you see. This, for the woman who sends at best, two or three texts a week and only ever makes any calls in an emergency. There really is nothing like obsessive 'just in case' topping-up, is there?
And you know what? As soon as she realises she'll have to use some of her credit to advise all her contacts of a number change, she'll decide not to bother anyway...!!
And if on the offchance she does start to use one of them, she'll be on the phone every five minutes asking me how to do this or that - and I won't have a clue, nor any way of finding out - as she'll have the instructions by then as well.
So I'm just consoling myself here with an earful of Shirley Bassey as I type! It's going to be an interesting day, I fear. Better nip out for some migraine pills, I reckon...
No comments:
Post a Comment