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| Gorilla on phone in San Diego Zoo where the only signal is near the door the keepers use. |
Yeah. Right.
I can now get a whole single intermittent bar of signal at home. This is one intermittent bar more than I used to get, which was zero bars or fewer.
Yee-hah!
All I have to do to get this new facility is to stand on the sink and wave the phone over my head with the cold tap running and the metal grill pan poking out of my left ear, a position from which it is slightly difficult to actually make or receive a call using my new nuclear (nucular) strength combined companies signal.
At least this is indoors. In the last property I had in Norfolk I had to climb a particular tree in the garden and sit in the top-most branches to make or receive a call. The number of times I was either catalogued by twitchers as a protected species of migrating Greater Balding Ugly-Bird and/or arrested by Police as an escaped tree-climbing loony was usually in double figures every month. OK, maybe some of that was my fault, I should have either worn pyjamas or not made calls at night. If it wasn't a plastic RSPB tag around my ankles and ten days in quarantine living off fat-balls and water then it was handcuffs around my wrists and a small fine for "indecent exposure with risibly inadequate equipment". I never knew whether to speed-dial Bill Oddie or my solicitor as they poked me out of my own tree with my own clothes prop. It was most disconcerting.
Why do they persist in calling them "mobile" phones when you can only use them in towns and cities where you don't really need a mobile phone at all and yet in the countryside, where you do need such a device, there's snafu or less?
I have to laugh at TV progs like Midsomer Murder and such, with H.M. Constables wandering through hedgerows and woodlands with phones that work everywhere all of the time. Written exclusively by folk who live in big towns and cities, mayhap? Folk who think that their local park is wildest tundra?
Apparently in towns and cities you can get phones that will let you browse the interwebnet and "do" video-calls and stuff. Amazing. Gods bless the towns and cities. Apparently they have "electric" street lighting and underground drainage systems there too!
Whatever will they think of next?
Sat-navs with up to date maps of all abandoned railway lines, sheer drops and BMW/Audi driver routes into the sea? Now wouldn't that be something to write home about (if you can find a post-box)? Or maybe you could call home about it (if you can find a phone-box that accepts coins)?
[Cynicism mode: OFF] [Ooh I could crush a grape!] [Probably] [Of course, we do get charged less for the service in H. M.'s Countryside... so that's alright then.] [Bugger - I thought I had turned Cynicism mode off] [Clicks head and neck to one side in that "android" way to disengage the entire printed circuit relating to services provided by raving international conglomerates]...
Someone (not sure who) has recently built a mini-Eiffel tower in nearby woods, so we now have perfect reception.
ReplyDeleteYesterday I went to buy a new SIM card for my Australian phone (don't ask), and was asked for my 'Identity Card'....Fume....Steam....Explode.
I shall return Monday with passport.
But without validation from some unknown faceless government bureaucrat how else could you know who you really are and that you are not buying an anti-civilisation pro-terrorist SIM card? It is our civic duty to revel in whatever "Current State of Officially Sanctioned Fear & Hysteria" that our governments give us...
ReplyDeleteExtracts tongue from cheek and wanders off, trying to remember the days when politics was about promising to make things a little better rather than about herding us to our knees through tales of bogey men under the bed.
Got asked for identity when buying a teaspoon from Sainsburys once. I'm a lethal weapon with a teaspoon. Apparently. Do you think we might be anti-heroes? We could get t-shirts and lycra capes, you can be SIM Card Man and I'll be The Teaspoon - we could bring down the world!
Rest assured, "country people" are not alone with their lack of mobile coverage. I lived in a city in California. I had a friend who lived in an even bigger city less than two hours south. When we used our mobiles with each other, we knew we had specific locations in our houses that worked and we had to stay in position or lose connection. She had to sit facing an interior wall in her home office. I had to sit facing my bedroom window. When I complained, AT&T told me I lived in the city that had the best coverage in Southern California. AT&T told my friend the same thing.
ReplyDeleteHi Mitch - many thanks for listening to my rant. I'm certain that reception and coverage were so much better and more consistent when things were analogue (just like TV signals were too). Digital nonsense has a lot to answer for!
ReplyDeleteStill, it's better than scribbling on our cave walls and hoping that the intended recipient will wander by!