The gods have done their best to convince me that I am doing too much impromptu online broadcasting this week. My wife commented that she has seen more of me on Instagram Live than in reality, and expressed no sadness about that.
On Monday, I was setting up to film something about my attitudes to home schooling when I knocked the phone out of my hand on to the floor, smashing the screen fairly spectacularly. There is something uniquely frustrating about experiencing real rage and knowing that you are the only person it can be directed at.
The phone was usable, but only if you were willing to accept that you could read just 50% of what was on the screen, and that every time you sent a text, tiny shards of glass were injected into your bloodstream through your thumb. I realised that I was going to have to order a new one.
Breaking your phone during normal life is one thing. Breaking your phone during a time when it has essentially become my lover and best friend is mortifying. I use the screen time tracker to tell me the number of hours I’m using it. During lockdown, it has just said: “You’re being a bit clingy.”
What has made the situation worse is that my son damaged his phone a couple of weeks ago and I told him to just deal with it and not be so pathetic. He has now seen the man who said that break his own phone, struggle not to cry, and order a new one within the space of about 10 minutes.
This time I couldn’t face talking to somebody, so I decided to do it online. Once I had logged on to our family mobile account, I had the humiliating experience of having a word with my wife and son about all the extra charges we were accruing, before realising they were all coming from my number. (I didn’t bother to tell them that.) I was then informed by the website that I was eligible for an upgrade, which roughly translated means: “Your contract expired a while ago, but we assumed you were too dumb to find out and now we are going to present the oversight as a potential opportunity.” What the message should have been was: “We’ve been taking the absolute piss and now you’ve caught us: here’s a refund to say sorry.”
Instead, I was given a series of options that not only required me to part-pay now, but to hugely overpay for the phone and data for at least two years. There was a time when the idea of a two-year contract was abhorrent; now that mobile phone companies know how addicted we are, they have collectively agreed to shaft us. People complain about individuals selling toilet paper at a markup, when phone providers have been exploiting the same position for years. I’m genuinely very angry about this. And in about six hours, I will forget about it completely for two years, until I have to sort my contract out again.
My laziness came to the fore when the phone arrived, however. The spanking new handset came with instructions on how to copy your data over, make sure your photos are not lost, and so much more. The number of things you have to do really takes the gloss off the little note saying, “Enjoy your new phone!”
Long story short, I still haven’t found the time to switch over to it. My thumbs are in agony.
