Keeping up with the Phoneses

If you are to survive the current times, occasionally you must get yourself a new mobile phone.

It’s even better if you can work out how to use it.

I can still remember one of my friends bringing his new-fangled mobile phone up the pub one night. I’d only ever seen them on the TV until that point, and it would be fair to say that ‘mobile’ was perhaps the wrong word to have used, as you needed to have spent several months in training beforehand to lift the massive telephonic brick.

Attempting to put it in your trouser pocket would have resulted in severe injury or an arrest for indecent exposure.

Come to think of it, ‘phone’ wasn’t a great choice for part of the name either, as the battery ran out in no time, and there was invariably no signal anyway. Even on the exceedingly rare occasion battery life and signal strength coincided, it was pretty unlikely that anyone would be calling you, as to do so would require them taking out a second mortgage or selling a kidney, and they would probably assume your ludicrously expensive gadget was out of juice or out of range and not bother anyway.

Perhaps, “Very Heavy And Hard To Move Thing That On A Good Day And With A Suitable Prevailing Wind Might Be Useable Briefly As A Means Of Telephonic Communication” might have been better, although it is undeniably less catchy.

Still, my pub chum was temporarily a very cool person indeed (even if his usual tipple was a ‘Lager Top’ and he wore white socks a lot).

Technology evolves so fast now that it’s entirely possible that whatever you purchase will be old-tech by the time you’ve finished unwrapping it, and that’s especially true of the trusty mobile.

My poor old smart phone could be likened to me on a Penny Farthing attempting the Tour De France – embarrassing to look at, painfully slow and quite likely to die at any moment.

After levels of research NASA would be impressed by, I finally selected my new model and have spent the last week doing the phone-based equivalent of going into a room for something and forgetting why I went there in the first place, but with the added complication of not knowing how to get out again. Or understanding the concept of doors.

Next time you spot a middle-aged, balding, man staring blankly at his phone, just remember it could be someone like me, dismally failing to understand how to even make a call, let alone access a wiffy hot-spot or log into a Google to download Apples or something.

On the bright side, I won’t look like a laughably old-fashioned buffoon (on the phone front, at least) until maybe next Tuesday.

The bigger screen means it’s heavier than my old phone, and I can’t get a signal a lot of the time in rural Cumbria. The battery doesn’t last very long either.

Mobile phones are so much better now.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 19th of June 2015. It's another in the continuing run that hasn't appeared on the paper's website, but seeing as there have been no updates at all on their Columns page since the 1st of the month, at least I don't feel like I'm being picked on. Not by the paper, anyway.

Somewhat clunkily, they've retitled it in the print edition as "Mobile made pub pal cool", and also put "NASA" as "Nasa". Yeah, I know.

The good news is that I now think my new phone (for which I've purchased a gaudy yellow clam case, which I feel slightly socially awkward about, like I'm trying to draw attention to myself or make some kind of statement) is the greatest thing since my previous new phone. True, I rarely send text messages, can't remember when I last got a call that wasn't attempting to convince me I needed to try and claim back money for being mis-sold PPI, and am usually at work or at home to use the wifi signal there.

As I live in rural Cumbria, I rarely seem to be anywhere that has enough of a data signal to make attempting to view a website or pictures on social media worthwhile either.

Still... should I go anywhere that allows me to get 4G, I fully expect to be stood in the street with my jaw open and an amazed look on my face.

I like photography, so the posh camera is rather splendid too, and even has manual focus, which is a nice option. On a long walk today I gave it a good try-out, and may also have discovered the topic for next week's column whilst having a cappuccino...

(On the last box of CD singles, and the letter S. Sting is currently being jazzy about The Wild Wild Sea...)

A fisful of change at the shops

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Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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