Technofear

Having failed to master the world of financial transaction lately, I turned my attention to the world of mobile telecommunications. My phone died while I was in New Zealand, and despite being kept alive well past the DNR point, it needed replacing.

I took a stroll to my local O2 store, where a series of attendants took turns attending me. Because my contract was not yet up, the phone was still on warranty. It appeared as though the battery was the issue, as it was warped out of shape and span on its axis. Beware the spinning battery! So, naively, I offered to purchase a replacement battery. This is not possible due to some law of electronics that insists that each component must be as totally unique as possible, thus preventing replacement in the event of failure - a system that makes it cheaper to replace the whole unit than get it fixed. What a disposable society we live in. I digress. 

Of course the phone was not an O2 phone, but a Samsung. O2 are just the service provider, though I was beginning to wonder exactly what service it was they were providing. So the handset would need to be dispatched to the manufacturers to be diagnosed with any certainty, a process that would take a week or so for them to tell me what we already knew. They would then replace the battery, because of course they have stocks but O2 don't, and the phone would be returned.

By chance, my contract was due to end ten days later, when I would be due an upgrade. It would take longer than ten days for it to be sent and returned, so a better solution was to upgrade early, a process that would cost me all of £12. This appeared to be a satisfactory alternative, so I was attended to once more and found the particular phone and deal that suited my needs. But in order to keep the benefits of my existing contract that I had been given by calling customer services when negotiating the original contract, I would have to call customer services again. Since I had no working phone with which to do that, I had to do it instore anyway. After some brief negotiations, they offered to give me the same benefits, but only if I waited until my upgrade was due, ten days later. Sad though it is to admit, the possibility of surviving for ten days without a mobile in the modern world did not seem plausible, but the thought of paying the £12 to get a worse deal was also unappealing. I was even offered a courtesy phone for £25. 

Finally, yet another attendant suggested purchasing a pay as you go handset to cover the intermediate ten days, and using the existing contract SIM card. This simple solution arrived just at the point that all hope was lost, and for the bargain price of £30 I was able to purchase a handset I didn't want along with £10 credit that I didn't need. Problem solved! Except that the new phone had none of my contacts on it, as these were cleverly stashed on the old, broken handset. Without any power, it would not be possible to retrieve them. Since I had already discovered the difficulties with sourcing replacement batteries, I was not full of hope. In fact, it's fair to say that, by this stage, I had lost any faith in the telecoms industry. An industry worth billions of pounds, designed to befuddle even moderately intelligent folks into smashing their assorted handsets into a billion tiny pieces, none of which will be replaceable.

However, the good folks at O2 pointed me in the direction of a local phone accessories store, where the proprietor may have something to help an idiot like me. Something like a battery. Needless to say, he didn't, but what he did have was even better: a slightly smaller battery and an impish look of glee in his eye. Using nothing but a folded wedge of paper, he managed to stuff the wrong battery into place, and hold it there while he powered up and rendered every possible warranty invalid. It then took an age for the contacts to convert across from the phone to the SIM card, during which time his fingers went blue from holding the battery in place so tightly. When complete, he transferred them to the new phone and, lo and behold, I was connected to the world again. My faith is humanity was restored, and I went on my merry way.

In celebration of this monumental feat of stupidity, I tried to send a text, but quickly found that I was unable to access any form of punctuation, making all of my messages seem really dry and uninspiring. I am clearly a moron when it comes to technology. And yet to my parents I am a genius! How is it that people with relative sense and intelligence can be so hopelessly lost by the advancement of technology as to waste half a day trying to replace one electronic item, and then waste just as much of their own time writing about it for other people to waste time reading about it?! It makes me despair that one technological failure leads to so much time, effort and money wasted to resolve it. Someone should come up with a solution to fix that. I think it's called an address book.

I think this neatly explains my predicament