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For the next couple of weeks I’m going to be doing some freelancing at Tech Digest, writing about gadgets and tech and stuff like that. If you’re craving some fresh new James O’Malley material, here’s some links to things that I’ve written so far:
So check out TD, they’re really cool, and that’s just not because they might give me some money soon. They’re genuinely excellent - they’re letting me write like I normally do, but on their popular website!
On Saturday, whilst in London, we briefly stopped by at the official Nokia store on Regents Street that opened fairly recently, which is incidentally, just across the road from the Apple Store.
After realising that the shop sold nothing but mobile phones, we headed for the exit, when a woman started talking to me. I thought she was trying to chat me up at first when she asked “do you come here often?”, but unfortunately, it turned out she was just doing some market research for Nokia.
She offered me five pounds if I’d participate in a “seven minute” survey, “Sold!”, I said.
It turns out that lying to someone taking a survey in real life is as easy as when you fill one out online. The questions were all about my perception of the brand, and whether I use my mobile phone as a “fashion accessory” - my reply to this question was essentially shooting back a scrunched up facial expression, as if to say “…really? C’mon… Really?”
I think one of the questions was like “what do you associate Nokia with?”, to which I responded “mobile phones” and “Finland”. I assume they were expecting answers like “high-disposable income, urban hipsters” or something.
“Which part of the shop did you go to today?” was a particularly obtuse question, considering it was quite a small shop. “I walked to the back of the shop… then back here to the front”. Like my other answers this was met with a neutral nod and some button pressing on the Nokia phone that was being used to record these answers.
What bugged me was that It wasn’t a very well designed survey - as time wore on (into minute five or six by now), I wanted to point out that qualitative research would be much better at this sort of thing than quantitative methods. “Of the list on the card, what features did you notice on first entering the store today?” “Er…” “The glass panels? The walls that change colour? The music being played?”.
Clearly I am one of those trendy young, aspirational professionals that Nokia are so keen to target.
Survey over, I was handed a brand new fiver. Excellent. When I move to London, I’m going to go the shop every day. Not only could I get a fiver a time, but I could potentially skew the survey results enough for Nokia to sponsor The World at War repeats on the History Channel or get them to bring out a phone with IRC and SSH-specific soft-keys.
My family seem to have reacted moderately positively towards their gifts. My sister enjoyed looking at her Top Shop voucher, my dad seemed pleased with the book he told me to buy him, and my mum better enjoy her kettle-with-built-in-water-filter, given the price.
I got another excellent present too: my sister got me a tiny remote controlled helicopter (made of polystyrene or something) - so expect the inevitable video of it landing on my dad’s bald head to follow shortly.
Christmas is excellent. Merry Christmas everyone, again.
To set the scene, on Saturday night, I was on the last train heading back from London, when I realised that my phone battery had run flat. It was annoying because it was a new mobile phone – a posh one that does everything too: internet, satellite navigation, plays music, takes photographs. I think it even makes phone calls. The only drawback with it is that if you decide that you actually need to use one of its many exciting features, it drains the battery in a matter of minutes.
The trouble was that I needed to ring my parents to let them know that I hadn’t been murdered in London – they worry like that. When it got to about half past eleven, an hour after I told them I’d be home I realised that if I left it any longer, they’d probably start kicking up a fuss and have most of London’s emergency services looking for my battered corpse, so I had to think of something.
I knew I’d have to ask another passenger on the train if I could borrow their mobile phone – which is a ridiculous request. The most you should ask of a fellow train passenger is if you can sit on the empty seat next to them – asking for anything more is breaking a big social taboo. What I wanted was far, far beyond the call of duty.
So I decided to ask an older couple on the train if I could borrow their mobile phone, to call my mum. The difficult thing was the phrasing of the question – I’m not very astute at the best of times, as I tend to just let the key words in a sentence fall out of my mouth in a jumbled order when talking to people. I needed to convey the genuine nature of my problem so that I didn’t sound like I was euphemistically saying “Hello, I’m a scruffy looking bloke and I’m going to mug you for your expensive mobile phone, so I can sell it in a pub and buy drugs with the proceedsâ€Â.
Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask, and amazingly, these complete strangers let me use their phone – even though I could have been, say, a murderer, or something for all they knew (I’m not).
I’m dead impressed by this – I’d previously assumed that everyone who didn’t know me, especially those I encounter on public transport, are just out to get me, in some way, but it turns out strangers are really nice people.
So what’s the moral of this story? Er… could it be the complete opposite of what we’re taught growing up? “Talk to strangers more�
I bet you can see where this is going, can’t you? I’ve made the above image because I’m sort of anticipating me complaining about mobile phone companies being a recurring theme if the past couple of days are anything to go by. Yeah, “S-H-I-T Mobile” is the best pun I could come up with. If I was still with my old network it could be OPoo. Its just a good job I’m not on Orange, as nothing rhymes with that.
The other day, I got my first bill, where I was mortified to see that I was for some reason being charged £32.50 a month, rather than the agreed £27.50. At first, I thought that they’d lied to me about VAT being included and had whacked it on top, but after ringing up customer services, it turned out that the woman in the shop had put me on the wrong “Web & Walk” tariff - the bonus money they extort from you for “unlimited” internet (in reality, capped at a gig a month). I thought I’d be paying £7.50 a month for it, but I was mistakenly being charged £12.50 a month for “Web & Walk Plus”.
“This should be easy to fix”, I foolishly thought. So, on the phone to customer services, I ask if they could correct the error. I was told that the people at customer services didn’t have the authorisation to do that, and I’d have to go into the shop I bought the phone from today and they’d sort it all out - customer services even promised to ring me today to check it had all been resolved (they didn’t; it hadn’t).
Act 2: Back in the shop
So back in the shop today, where I’d previously lost two and a half hours of my life, I spent another 90 minutes faffing about. The woman who originally sold me the phone and made the error was there, which made life slightly easier. What she did was explain that the stores aren’t able to change contracts, so she phoned customer services. The same customer services I’d been speaking to myself - on the same number. She explained the same thing as I did, but had the added authority of working for T-Mobile or something. They put her through to a call centre that was apparently in Manila, where apparently the operator didn’t speak very good English. This strikes me as a bit odd, as you’d think the first question you’d ask if employing someone to work in a call centre that will serve Britain is “can you speak English?”.
The person on the other end of the phone kept telling her that you can’t change the contract for eleven months. She kept telling them that it was because of a mistake and not out of choice. But they wouldn’t budge.
By now it was getting pretty desperate, so a workaround solution was looked for. Apparently I could cancel my contract, and take out a new one, as I’m still within the fourteen day “you can still back out now” period. I’d have to give back my phone, which I’ve already filled with numbers, texts and personalised only to be given an identical new handset. And worse still, I’d lose my number - which was my old O2 number I’ve had for the last five or more years, as I’d had it transferred over.
It got to a point where the staff member decided it might be easier to try and convince me that the more expensive internet tariff is the better option, by explaining how I can get streaming TV channels on my phone. This made me think of the old Jack Dee observation: Why do I want a TV on my phone? I have a TV. “Not a chance in hell”, I said slightly less succinctly than the quote I’m attributing to myself.
I ended up leaving saying I’d ring customer services again myself and threaten to kick up a fuss if they couldn’t do it.
Act 3: Ringing Customer Services (again)
So I phoned customer services again on the way home, where I once again explained this whole tedious story, and was then told that they’re not authorised to fix it. The operator on the phone then put me on hold whilst she rang the store I was just in, only to be told the same thing. After a lengthy wait listening to the T-Mobile approved sellouts who’s music is used on their TV adverts, the operator informed me that she’d just spoken to the manager, who said if I go in tomorrow, he’ll be able to change it.
Act 4: Ringing the shop
Sceptical of this, I ring the shop directly to check. The manager informs me that he still couldn’t - he merely was offering to terminate my contract and give me a whole new one, complete with new handset and number. “For fucks sake”, I thought.
Eventually, he seemed to just give up and want to buy my silence, and offered me fifty quid in one lump sum, to cancel out 10 months of £5 a month more than what I should be paying. He did point out that its only after eleven months that you can change your contract - so I was still losing a fiver because of T-Mobile’s ineptitude. He tried to justify this by explaining that it’d probably cost me a fiver anyway to drive to the shop and get a brand new phone and contract because I’d have to pay for parking and so on… but why would I be doing that? To sort my fucking phone out after they fucked up!
Act 5: Soliloquy
So it now, finally, seems just about sorted. Technically I’m still on the more expensive web & walk tariff, so I can use up to 3gb a month and Skype away to my heart’s content. So I sort of win, I guess.
I’m still a bit pissed off though, because of all the faff. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve no problem with the staff in the shop I bought the phone from, as everyone makes mistakes. Its just the inept response to solving what should be a simple problem. I just wanted to rant about it on the internet, where someone might see it and decide not to go with T-Mobile. Which would stick it to them properly.
I bought a new phone today, because my old phone is barely functional. It turns out that buying a phone is approximately infinite hassle. I knew what I wanted: a Nokia N95, and I knew that I didn’t want to get a contract of more than £20 a month, because frankly, that’s too much as it is. I’d seen an offer on the T-Mobile website for exactly this - but I thought I’d go around the mobile phone shops to see if I can get the same deal on O2, the network I’m on at the moment, on the basis that it would probably be less faff. How wrong I was.
Scene 1 - the O2 shop
I made the mistake of approaching the trainee sales person, who’s breath stunk (I wasn’t kissing him, you could smell it from a metre away), and enquiring if they were willing to negotiate on contract prices, on the basis that nearly everyone I know has an anecdote about how they bought a phone and got some sort of excellent deal on it after doing some bartering.
“We can’t do stuff like that… blah blah blah… head office… blah blah blah”, says the trainee. I kind of lost interest once I knew he wasn’t going to be very helpful.
Scene 2 - Phones4u
I think mobile phone retail is that sort of intermediary step between being a lowly tillmonkey and swaggering open-necked sales twat. I was hanging around looking at the phones, waiting for one of the sales vultures to try and chat me up, when the manager started talking to me. I explained what I was looking for, the rival deal that I had seen on the internet, and he referred me to the sales guy. “Take a seat”, he said, and I sat down.
It was here I encountered perhaps my first ever first-hand experience of a “hard sell”. It was a very high pressure thing. The salesman got out a contract and started asking me for personal details before he’d so much as asked what I was looking for. He’d even surreptitiously put me down for a bluetooth headset that I didn’t need.
With the details practically filled out, he got out at blank sheet of A4 paper, and began explaining the £45 a month deals to me - and how that if I wanted a cheaper contract I’d have to pay £400 for the phone as well. Despite his writing being near illegible, and the information he was transcribing being nonsensical - just figures that make no sense without context - he persisted in writing stuff down whilst trying to talk me into an expensive contract.
He clearly wasn’t having much success, as I was having none of it - I wasn’t going to budge. His manager could see that he was floundering, so slithered over in his slimey way, and I thought he was going to do that thing they do on Rogue Traders all the time, where the crooked salesman asks his boss for a discount, and the boss grants it as a “one time only special offer”, and the customer is pressured into taking it because its such a “spectacular” deal. This didn’t happen though, because £35/month is out of my budget too. Like I said at the beginning.
It got to the point where, in order to illustrate the fact that I’d apparently either have to compromise on price or handset, the salesman turned the page over, and drew two boxes, putting ticks in them, and then drew a dividing line between them, and held up the piece of paper to really illustrate his point.
It was at this point I decided to leave - but not before he insisted I take his card… and insisted on writing a day and time on which I’d come back to see him to finish the deal.
Scene 3 - The T-Mobile Shop
I walked thirty seconds up the road, into the T-Mobile shop, and got a Nokia N95 for £70, on a £20 a month contract. Job done.
The staff in the shop were generally pleasant and helpful (although it did turn out they delayed running a coverage check on my postcode until after the sale because my town has no 3G coverage). What I didn’t anticipate though was the faff involved in making the sale. There was a credit check, many forms needing to be signed - I even had to go to the bank to find out my account number. I love gadgets, but its enough to drive anyone insane.
What I’ve neglected to mention is that throughout this adventure, my friend Katy was with me - and despite being a woman and practically genetically programmed to enjoy shopping, I thought she was going to kill herself (or me) after the first hour and a half of trying to buy a phone.
I was happy though - I’ve got a rather excellent phone out of it, even if the shopping aspect was intensely irritating.
Scene 4 - Back home
Unfortunately it didn’t end there though. Despite being thoroughly bored of hearing about free minutes and free insurance, I had to ring O2 this evening about transferring my number, where before they would tell me my PAC code (the code used to transfer your number to a different network), they insisted on putting me through to sales, who tried to convince me to stay. A woman spent a good five minutes explaining what deals O2 had, before I explained that I signed an 18 month contract only a few hours previously.
I can’t think of anything else to write about my trip to Paris, so you may be delighted to hear this is probably going to be my last post about it. There’s several other things I wanted to tell you about, but try as I might, I can’t seem to pad them out to full blog-entry sized. So here are some micro-anecdotes of varying tedium:
Anecdote Number One
We went to Les Invalides, which used to be a military hospital and is now the war museum and houses Napoleon’s tomb. The war museum was excellent. It was like being in a Medal of Honor theme park. You walked through in chronological order the history of French military defeats between 1871 and 1945. Its interesting to see the old WWII kit up close, as the rocket launchers in real life look just like they do in the game. I can’t say I learnt anything new, but there was some cracking maps of various alliance systems and stuff like that. They even had a full size V2 rocket on display.
Les Invalides… sitting next to JD and myself just outside of the frame.
Napoleon’s tomb was ace too. Not really sure why as it was just a dead bloke in a big box, and you couldn’t really see the dead bloke. But they had his famous hat and coat on display. There was also the (much smaller) tomb of Napoleon II. He was the less famous one - roughly analogous to Jonathan Dimbleby.
Has Napoleon been dead long enough for a thumbs-up to be tasteful?
Anecdote Number Two
We went on a boat tour along the Seine. It wasn’t bad… it was in-Seine. It turns out that we were on a boat tour famous enough to get its own Wikipedia page. It was pretty good, although the commentary was pretty lacking. It basically consisted of the pre-recorded narrator saying things like “To starboard, is the Eiffel Tower… it is very big” - statements with very little substance or historical context. It played about eight languages one after each other, so if you were listening in Japanese, you probably wouldn’t know what you were looking at until you’d passed it.
Fundar becomes a unicorn at night. We have a crude nickname for him when he’s like this.
Anecdote Number Three
Whilst my holiday was an unmitigated success in both its execution and the results that it yielded, there was an unacceptable level of collateral damage. After one day in the field, my two-month-old PDA has died. The screen has sustained a gigantic wound on the screen rendering it unusable.
So I’ve had a look at the travel insurance details, and here’s a paraphrase of all of the things they don’t insure as part of the travel insurance package:
I wonder when the history books are written, what will be the great inventions of the modern era? When future archaeologists are piecing together the remains of our society after the inevitable nuclear holocaust, what inventions are they going to single out as pivotal and important to 21st century technology? Who will be remembered as the next Babbage? The next Edison? The next Berners-Lee?
Unfortunately, I think its fairly unlikely that it’s going to be me - aside from being little more than a distraction from humankind’s pursuit of knowledge, writing drivel tends to have a limited shelf life. Especially when you have as many awkward pop-culture references forced in as I do. Its why nobody finds Love Thy Neighbour funny anymore. The same applies to Fred Basset… then again, maybe he was never funny.
Even if on the off-chance my writing on here does survive for hundreds of years, no one will read it in the way I’ve intended - it’ll be used by English teachers to torture kids with. Children will have to write timed essays over-analysing everything I’m saying, and describing how I foreshadow towards later events in my work. (Spoiler: the last word in this blog entry will be ’stuff’).
So I sort of wish that I’d gone down the career path of learning how to make stuff. Useful stuff - like what an engineer might make. I could have pioneered a new type of bridge and opened up a new passage to India by building a bridge all the way there. But no, I strangled my engineering talents at birth and stamped on its bloody corpse. Its a shame, as I’ve had some really good ideas for things that haven’t been invented yet, but I’m not capable of making them myself.
Why hasn’t anyone invented a GPS PDA, where you can set up a “to do” list with co-ordinates of where you need to do them? If the PDA detects that you’re in the area, it could make a noise to remind you to do something. It’d be tremendously useful for non-time sensitive things like “remember to buy that CD” when you’re in the vicinity of the town centre, or “remember to get your watch fixed”. (The latter wouldn’t be time sensitive because you’d have no way of knowing what the time is, obviously).
On a similar note, how about an in-car GPS system with an “I’m picking people up” mode, where you can put in the locations of everyone who’s going somewhere with you, and the destination where you ultimately want to be, and it’ll guide you on the most efficient route to all of your friends and the destination. Who knows… this could save literally minutes of time maybe. I think I’m just slightly obsessive-compulsive when it comes to efficiency.
Why isn’t there a social networking website where your profile is a bit like a Wiki, and your friends, but not yourself, are able to edit your profile at will to try and describe what you’re really like? In fact, I’m surprised this isn’t already a Facebook application.
And here’s an idea for a Wiki that I’m too lazy to make: whytheyrebastards.com, which is basically like a sensationalist version of Knowmore, listing reasons why you should hate certain companies or people. It’d be dead good, and useful reference for when you want to slag something off on an internet forum.
I’ve also had a great idea for a new TV innovation. When TV was invented they were little square things. This was then improved and they got a little bit bigger, then in the 90s, Widescreen suddenly became the in-thing. It’s all well and good being able to see extra at the sides of the picture… so why can’t we have more picture at the top and bottom? The next logical evolution would be Tallscreen TVs - all you’d need is a couple of inches on the top and bottom of the picture. They could make it, say, three quarters of the width tall. It’d be excellent - I can’t believe anyone hasn’t thought of it.
I wish I was an inventor so I could make this stuff.
This means that after seven long, arduous years, I am now no longer a delinquent teenager, and thus a proper serious adult. This obviously means that I can no longer get away with anti-social behaviour and smoking drugs - not that I did anyway. I’ll have to forget about even thinking of using a bus again until I’m retired.
To prove how much of a serious adult I am now, and to complement all of the suit wearing I intend to be doing in the future, I treated myself to a PDA (An Acer N50) the other day, and it arrived yesterday, when I was still young enough to download games on to it and not have any use for the important business functions on it, like the calendar and business contact book (which sorts by surname and not first name, underlining just how important and high powered business is).
24 hours later and things are completely different - Microsoft Excel is the application I use most frequently, and I have set the colour scheme to be grey and beige, and when I switch it on I am greeted with a firm handshake and definitely not a high-five.
This of course means that whenever I travel on the train from now on, I’ll be able to blend into any one of the three train-using demographics: vagrants, students, and how powered business people. I’ll be able to use phrases like “I’ll see if I have a window in my schedule” when arranging things.
Geek-wise, it’s a pretty excellent PDA. Well, it’s not really “geek-wise” any more, as only teenagers care about “cred”, and would thus worry about (or indeed celebrate) being called a geek. So whereas before, I’d have cited my genuine enthusiasm for the wifi/bluetooth/USB host/SDIO/CF support as geeky, I think I should now refer to it as an adaptable integrated interoperability and expandability solution - which is good when you’re doing important business and are a responsible adult.
That’s the theory at least - I’m assuming that the invitations to the important adult things, like meetings with my tax agent, sit-down Lighthouse Family gigs and orientation seminars that teach you how to complain that the youth of today aren’t like they were back in your day, are in the post. Unfortunately, my PDA calendar only contains one scheduled thing at the moment: what I’m going to be doing to celebrate my birthday.
In a youthful folly, I booked tickets go and see Tom Morello playing a gig on Monday supporting a left wing cause that I now think is silly, because I’m now world-weary and automatically more conservative than before. Stop the war? Bit late for that now - get over it and support our troops, you hippy kids.
Merry Christmas everyone! As you might expect, today has been the most fantastic of days. I’m not entirely sure how they managed it, but my excellent parents managed to get me a Wii. Yes, a Wii - ending a story arc that’s lasted at least ten days.
I’m pleased to say that it lives up to expectations. Here’s a badly produced video of me boxing:
I think one of the best things about it is that my entire family have been having a go (despite only having the one controller). We’ve been playing Wii Sports all day- and I think its pretty clear that Nintendo have created a revolution in video games when I’m getting thrashed at virtual ten-pin bowling and and virtual golf by my parents and even my 75 year old grandad. It was interesting because today was the first time I’ve played “golf” since I smashed my grandad around the head with a golf club in Cromer when I was about twelve. Luckily history didn’t repeat itself today. Here’s an exciting video of my grandad having a go at Wii boxing… and winning:
Yeah, he now joins the ranks of the hundreds of other “old people playing computer games” videos on YouTube.
Other present highlights include the atlas I got my sister. The hilarious family in-joke is that she wants to study Geography at University, yet she can’t find Germany on a map. In something a pre-empted retaliation, she got me a book on the worst multi-storey car parks in the country.
Yeah, its been a good day. An excellent day. Merry Christmas everyone!
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