After an epic and painful battle, I have got my iPhone! This is quite an upgrade from Motorola RAZR V3.
When I thought it was all over I had one more long and confusing call to make to Vodafone customer “services”. At one point I was informed that I did not even have an account and that my number did not exist. I am quickly learning to expect trauma when Vodadone have to do complicated things or solve problems.
All is hopefully resolved now! I am updating my blog from the iPhone! :-D
Since the end of last year I have been slightly unwell. I have refused to give in, as usual. I just went about my business with the lurgy gripping me by the ankles, dragging it around behind me – refusing to let go.
Just as I refused to surrender, so did the lurgy. Every day it tightened its grip a bit more, making it harder to pull behind me. I am not used to getting progressively more ill every day, feeling worse every morning. Mostly I was in denial.
There was a kind of battle going on in my head – every day I would stand, challenged by an anthropomorphic personification of illness, trying to stare it out, not letting it know that it was getting to me.
Lurgy: “Stop! Go to bed, and be ill!”
Me: “I’m fine! Nothing wrong with me, fuckface! Now, take your snot and piss off. I have stuff to do. Now, if you will excuse me?…”
Lurgy: “But…”
Me: “Piss off.”
Yesterday my nerve finally went, this theoretical confrontation every day became more than I could bear – I snapped.
Lurgy: “Stop! Go to bed, and be ill!”
Me: “Nothing *wheeze* wrong *cough* with urrrghh.. me! *cough*cough*wheeze*”
Lurgy: “Yes there is! You just coughed until you went purple and could hardly breathe!”
Me: “Nonsense!”
Lurgy: “Purple! I saw you! And walking up the stairs at work nearly killed you!”
Me: “Lies! *cough*cough*aaaagghh…*sneezingfit*”
Lurgy: “Your head just exploded with snot and you’ve gone purple again! I win!”
Me: “Okay fine! You win. I am going to the doctor. You shall be killed in the face with antibiotics!”
Next day.
Lurgy: “You have passed the test!”
Me: “…”
Lurgy: “Now that you have admitted defeat, I am going. My work here is done. You submitted and I shall now do the same to other people in your office, because you did not give in and coughed all over them for nearly two whole weeks.”
Me: “I feel much better now…”
Lurgy: “You gave in, the battle is now over. You passed the ’showing humility in the face of a superior biological force test.’ I have won. You are weak and have admitted it, brought to your knees by a microscopic virus.”
The other terrible ongoing struggle has been with Vodafone, and the case of the non-existent iPhone. I am having a little trouble trying to get my new phone… I don’t even know if they have despatched it or tried to deliver it. I don’t even who WHO is delivering it, Vodafone have made a total clusterfuck of the iPhone launch. Currently waiting for a reply to my e-mail or some other sign that the Apple iPhone 3GS 32GB (in black) that I pre-ordered is actually going to arrive.
In the mean-time they have just crippled the fuck out of my current phone, it claims to have credit but won’t make any calls. I wish I had just gone to o2 or Orange, or waited until Vodafone had them for sale in shops.
When not psychically battling the plague and arguing with Vodafone I have mostly been in meetings. There should be warning when people accept promotions/better jobs that things like meetings will keep happening. Yesterday I was in one that lasted two and a half hours – I just wanted to crawl into a corner and die afterwards – especially as that was the day the lurgy monster cranked it up to eleven to fuck me over and bring me to my knees.
Christmas is a lot more pleasant and easy to deal with now that I don’t live where the rest of my family do. Everything went well and according to plan, annoyingly for this blog because I have nothing much to write about.
I sort-of-finished at work on Friday 18th but had to go in to the office for a brief visit to sort something out on the Monday, but I was there less than an hour. I had a few days just skulking about my flat being in a bad mood and feeling miserable, then on Wednesday I traveled through the ice and snow to stay with my parents.
I spent Christmas day consuming my body weight in alcohol and chocolate. I started off with the champagne, moved to Jack Daniels after noon, red wine at lunch and baileys in the evening. I’d have stuck with the champagne all day but it ran out.
I want to have champagne for breakfast every day. But many years ago I used to have Tequilla for breakfast and that just caused problems. Probably best to just do this once a year.
For some reason the alcohol didn’t make me feel uncomfortable and weird like it has done recently.
The day before Christmas I did something I have been waiting to do for some considerable time – I bought an iPhone. I was planning on getting an iPhone last year but had a few months out of work, by the time I’d recovered rumours of o2 losing their exclusive contract to sell the iPhone were everywhere so I decided to hang on and hope Vodafone started to sell them. I really did not like the idea of being on o2, I’ve been extremely happy with Vodafone since I switched to them. So, the week Vodafone started taking pre-orders I went in and signed up for an iPhone 3GS 32GB.
Now I am being extremely impatient because it won’t be delivered until the 14th of January. I want my iPhone!
2010 is going to be year of new shiny things for me. I’ll have the iPhone, in February I’m buying a new MacBook Pro when they’ve been updated and I’m hoping to get a DSLR camera, HD TV and Blu-Ray player as well.
There seems to be an increasing divergence between what mobile phones can be acquired if you agree to take out a contract and those you can have if you do not.
This is putting aside the Apple iPhone, which is offered for pay as you go customers at a price that is alarmingly high and ridiculous. Over 18 months the payg price, for me, is still much lower even taking into account top-ups for credit and data add-ons after the first year.
What I want, though, is a normal mobile phone. Even if I did not own a perfectly serviceable 80GB iPod Classic I would probably not buy an iPhone. I’d be more inclined to buy an iPod Touch and a mobile phone. I have wi-fi at home and work and access to BT Openzone hotspots, which cover Nottingham like digital acne.
I have been looking at available phones a fair bit online because my, now aging, Motorola RAZR V3 (yes, behold my luddite tendencies!) is developing Alzheimer’s. Something with the charge management system has gone weird, I even bought it a new battery a few months ago and after a call it sometimes thinks it has no charge and beeps at me urgently until I turn it off an on and it realises that it still has three bars of charge.
But where are the quality, well designed options on pay as you go? Nowhere. If I want a contact they’ll give me all manner of nice looking featureful objects gratis and then suck a huge profit back with a contact I’ll barely make use of. Weeks can pass without me using more than about 40p of credit sometimes. All actual phone calls I make are from my VOIP line, because it is cheep and I work near home, which is in the city center, so when I am out doing things around Nottingham I am never more than a short walk home.
I only have a mobile phone these days because it is expected, given the choice I’d leave the damned thing in a drawer and forget about it. Its main duty is as an alarm clock. Occasionally I’ll use mobile internet I probably send about £1 worth of texts a month maximum.
This does not mean I am content with a cheap plastic lump of crap. I want something well designed which does it’s job in as pleasant a way as possible. It has to look nice and behave admirably when used. For this I am prepared to pay money. If you are to pigeonhole me as a consumer I am the person prepared to buy a 17″ Apple MacBook, despite being able to buy four normal laptops for the price. I like quality products.
What I do not want is to find myself with a £30-35 contract for a phone, even if they give me the thing at no immediate cost. For one thing, I won’t use it enough to be cost effective and for another it will lock me and my phone number (which I have had for 11 years now) to that contract.
The phones currently available on pay as you go are utter arse, iPhone aside. Vodafone literally offers nothing that I would want to own without agreeing to a contact that is not cost effective.
Does light use really have to mean I am limited to cheap, poor quality plastic turdphones?
I’ll probably end up with an iPhone just because it is the only piece of quality mobile phone hardware I can get without a contract, which will mean switching to o2 despite being happy with everything about Vodafone but the options for non-contract handsets they offer.
This blog has no defined purpose other than to exist as a, mostly ignored, corner of the internet where things that I do can conjeal into a sticky mess and fester. I am twenty-eleven years old, single, I live in Nottingham, UK, I sit at a desk prodding data all day and in the evenings I study Art History, usually without any trousers on.
