Kafka Calling

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My phone, pager, wristwatch, alarm clock, FM radio, mp3 player, stills-camera and video-camera are all the same device.

This is normal. It can also search google and facebook, play games and movies, and be a calendar and dictaphone. Apparently this is a bottom of the range model.

Three weeks ago it stopped working. Which has rather left me without a phone, pager etc.

The nice people at the phone shop said I could either send it away to be repaired, or take it to the big phone shop on the other side of town, where they'd fix it themselves. So I took it to the big shop...and they told me to come back the next day because their phone repair man had gone home.

So I went back the next day and tried again. And got asked to come back tomorrow because the repair man had gone home early.

So I went back the next day and gave them my phone. They said they'd send me an email when it was fixed. This didn't happen.

Fourteen days later I got a letter through the door saying it was fixed - with a software upgrade too! Testing it in the shop...it still didn't work. Oh, and they hadn't given it to their repair man at all, possibly on the grounds that he didn't really exist - they'd sent it a few dozen miles by post for someone to push a button marked "Factory Reset".

But obviously the fixers hadn't heard of testing to make sure their fixes had actually, you know, fixed anything. So now it's being posted back to them, with an ever so slightly sarcastic covering note, asking them to try again.

I've been using my crappy old phone in the meantime. It's nothing more than, well, a phone, with an FM radio - but it's got a much better keypad for txting...and it's never gone wrong. Go figure.

Now, this is the second time my 'advanced' phone has malfunctioned, so I thought I should probably get a backup phone for if/when it happens again. Like maybe from ebay? Or even the same phone shop?

If I get a new phone with a contract, I get the phone free and pay GBP8.68 per month plus whatever calls I make after the first 100 minutes, which I don't intend to. So that's about GBP200 over a two year contract. No.

Unless I buy the same phone without the simcard that I've no intention of ever using...in which case it costs 25% more and all up front. Plus an extortionate (but unspecified on the website) rate if I ever do make a call on it. Um...no.

On ebay I might get lucky and get one for GBP30. Or I could get an mp3 player with FM Radio and a frelling built-in video camera for GBP10 - and continue to use my old basic phone as the phone.

In fact I can get a basic mp3 player with eight gigabytes onboard memory for GBP4 - the cost of a triple shot of whiskey - including delivery. Unless I want one with a rechargeable battery, in which case it's ten times as much.

It's possible all this makes perfect sense and I'm the crazy one. If not, I may be soon.

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