Resistance is futile
I’m afraid I’ve finally given in to the forces of darkness and sold my soul to the Devil. Have I joined New Labour? No, not quite that evil, but I do feel quite disgusted with myself nevertheless. After years of nagging by friends, I’ve actually bought a mobile phone.
I do like gadgets in general, but for some reason I’ve always found mobile phones extremely annoying. Sure, they can be useful, but most of the time they’re just irritating, obtrusive and anti-social. They should certainly be banned on public transport.
For a while my friends kept pestering me to get one, but after several years they gave up. I put up with the weird looks from strangers, and almost started taking a perverse pride in being about the only person over 3 years of age not to have a mobile. (When I was at the hospital the other day I was asked, as next of kin, for my mobile number. When I said I didn’t have one, the administrator didn’t seem to quite grasp the concept of someone not having one… I did wonder if leaving the mobile number field blank might actually bring the entire NHS database crashing to the ground!). Every now and again I’d find myself in a position where one would be handy, but by and large I was quite happy without. After all, if people want to contact me they can do so via home phone/voicemail, fax, and email, so it’s rather nice to be uncontactable sometimes.
I did almost buy one when WAP came out, but then I actually used WAP and… well, let’s just say it wasn’t enough of a ‘killer app.’ to change my mind.
But the other day I just thought ’sod it, I’ll get one’ — mainly to shock the hell out of my friends, but with the added bonus of peace of mind after my mum’s recent stroke. So I spent a few hours online reading reviews and doing price searches, then went and bought one (from Comet on the Old Kent Road of all places — since when have the big, high street electrical chains offered the best deal for anything? — but they really were twenty quid cheaper than anywhere else). So now I’m the owner of an unflashy Siemens phone.
In the 24 hours I’ve had it, I’ve made one call on it — to myself — and sent 2 text messages, and received one call. Can’t see what all of the fuss is about…
One of the things I’d always hated about mobile ‘culture’ was the whole personalisation thing. I mean, if someone needs to customise their phone in order to reflect their personality, there’s probably not too much personality there in the first place. Paying a few quid to get a crappy little bitmap logo or the latest Craig David ringtone… for goodness sake, get a grip!However, I may have to eat my words. I don’t care how many damn ringtones it’s got (20), I just want a simple, unobtrusive beep-beep, or better still a traditional ring-ring. Or so I thought… Now I find that of the twenty ringtones, 16 are musical — awful stuff like Greensleeves — and the beepy ones are all to similar to really make use of the distinctive ring for categorised callers. So last night I was horrified to find myself considering paying three quid to download a new ringtone — couldn’t find the Quincy theme tune, nor the death march I wanted for business clients’ calls, but The Sweeney and Born Slippy are forerunners. Oh God, what have I become?!!!
Any offers for Badgers new mobile number? Let’s start the bidding at a tenner…..