Catching up with the 21st Century

I have mentioned before that we are not really au fait with modern communications technologies despite our early adoption of IT. We have remained stuck in our 1990s mud to a large extent. I have also mentioned that we now have a need to get up to speed and to find a way of maintaining communications when we go off on a long trip. We do not care  for mobile phones and have no wish to be connected when we are out and about unless we want to dial out in case of emergency. We like our Pay As You Go arrangement, whereby a £10 top up lasts us for a year or two mainly because we rarely switch the phone on, and were downhearted at the prospect of establishing a contract in order to gain a little data transfer. Imagine our delight then, when researched revealed that our current arrangement can also give us data. Apparently all that was required was to text a four digit number back to our provider when we top up and, hey presto, we have 500MB of data transfer.

It took us a while but the SMS app on the phone was finally found, the magic number entered and followed by the voucher code.

Of course this means that we now have over £20 in call credit, which we shall take years to  use up – but we can now look up important things such as tide tables and ferry operations news when we are on the road.

Maybe.

You see, we bought our top up voucher in Tesco on Thursday night last and it was Sunday, back in town at Helgi’s, before we had a signal in order to register the voucher.

And you wonder why we cannot be bothered with such a silly technology?

It is worth noting that had we added £20 of calls instead of £10, we could have gained 2GB of data transfer. Useful, perhaps, but that would have been a stupid amount of call credit (for us.)

Note to self: if planning an emergency, have it it the right location as help can not otherwise be summoned.

I ask you, what was wrong with dropping 4d in the slot and pressing Button A ? Apart from the traditional smell of wee, of course.

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