Well, I did it. Yesterday morning at 7 a.m, I was on a website for refurbished phones, sorting myself out a replacement for my current old faithful of the last 5+ years. I was becoming a bit fed up with the WhatsApp warnings popping up informing me that it wouldn’t be supporting its app on my old phone beyond the beginning of May, and also with my old phone’s battery saying, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine…I’m dead,’ in increasingly short spaces of time. It died on me on a recent FaceTime with my mum, and I had to scramble a return call on my iPad before she went all frantic and into her default diatribe about ‘these things having a mind of their own.’
‘It’s alright, Mum,’ I said, when I called her back. ‘It was my phone running out of battery.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I swear these things have a mind of their own.’
🙄
Anyhoo, I adopted a no faff attitude to selecting a ‘new’ phone because the choices out there in tech-land are ridiculous and I wanted to do other stuff with my day, like live it. I set a budget - maximum £250 - as I reasoned that if it lasts me another 5 years like the old one, that’s only £50 a year or less than £1 a week. I wanted one the same size as my iPhone 6 because I can’t be doing with clunking great things rattling around in my bag, which narrowed it down to the iPhone Mini range, and I was happy with 64GB of memory space (is that what it’s about? GB?) as that’s what I had on the iPhone 6 and it’s been more than enough for my Elder Lady Luddite needs.
‘What do you want to use your phone for?’ was one of the ‘Choose the right phone for you’ questions.
‘Making and receiving phone calls and texting,’ said I. ‘What else would I use it for?’
I found an ‘As new’ condition iPhone 12 for £214.99. That’ll do, I thought. It is 5 inches by 2.5 inches in size. It is black. It looks like new. And it arrived this morning, just over 24 hours after I bought it.
Lord Malarkey, Tech Man, immediately took possession in order to set it up for me. I think this was triggered by me saying, ‘What do I do now? Just plug it in?’ Anyway, he gathered up my old phone, my new phone and my iPad and put them altogether in a corner where he huddled himself over them and muttered away for ten minutes or so. I think he was delivering some sort of mystical incantation á la Three Witches in Macbeth. All I know is that when I tried to engage him in conversation he didn’t hear a word I was saying. Didn’t want to break the magic spell, I suppose.
‘Do you want to set up facial recognition?’ he asked me at one point.
‘Absolutely NOT,’ said I. Good grief, it’s bad enough having to surrender my fingerprint to technology. It’ll be asking for blood next. Sheesh…
The upshot is that my new phone is now fully in charge of all the stuff that was on my old phone, which has now been consigned to a drawer as a useful ‘spare’ because there is nothing wrong with it. I might use it as a dictaphone, or to play music on. Poor thing. Years of faithful duty and consigned to the scrap heap merely because the advances in technology say so. I know how it feels. I spent a short while deleting all the superfluous apps that appeared on the new phone’s screen which it seemed to assume I would need because I was a useless tool of a human being who was incapable of finding anything, measuring anything, writing anything, managing my health or translating any language into Mongolian without its help. The screen now looks like the screen I am used to. Plus ça change, and that’s the way I like it, aha aha. (K.C and the Sunshine Band.)
I am now waiting for a new phone case to arrive. My old phone case is marginally too big for the new phone. The width is fine but the length is half a centimetre too long so there’s a bit of wobbly going on, and the camera lens is obscured. And I have to confess now that I spent more time considering the choices of case than the choice of phone itself. I plumped for this one in the end:
Cat like Bambino, vase of daisies and a mug of tea. Perfect.
The PowerPoint I sent off a couple of days ago for Assignment 2.3 of my diploma has passed muster. My tutor said he thoroughly enjoyed reading it and he hoped others would get to enjoy reading it in the future.
I think that’s highly unlikely.
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KJ