Ring ring, why don’t you give me a call?

Actually please don’t just at the moment – at least not on the mobile. The company we’re with contacted us to say that our mobile handset is so terribly dated (I think it’s the only one still being used) that they’re switching off the equipment that it makes it work, so in a few days’ time it’ll die. Because we’re so lovely they’ve sent us a ‘free’ replacement of something more recent; we’re not at all impressed. Not only are the buttons tiny and make my arthritis flare when I try to use it, and Ned’s fingers are a bit big, all the controls are in different places.

The instruction book starts “It’s probably not your first mobile phone, so you might want to skip this bit” (no, I don’t actually. I want to know how you turn it on). By enlisting the help of chums on another site I’ve found where the punctuation is (with the ‘1’ button, not the ‘0’) and how to leave a space in text (with the ‘0’ button, not the sideways arrow. There isn’t a sideways arrow). What I have managed to do is not only turn off predictive text (I’ve no idea how I managed to turn it on in the first place) but also add a lovely new ring-tone which I spent all yesterday evening installing. (The theme from the 1960s TV series of Robinson Crusoe, if you're interested. Shame my tinny version sounds as though it's played on a stylophone, rather than the marvellous full-bodied orchestral number. That just blows me away!)

If we’d wanted to change our mobile I wouldn’t be bothered about the hassle – but we were perfectly happy with the old one. It made phonecalls, which is all we wanted. It also sent texts, which was occasionally useful, although sometimes they took hours to be received at the other end. Now we have to faff about putting yet more credit on the damn thing to activate it and get the remaining credit from the old phone transferred over. Then we’ll need to ring ourselves to find out what you press to answer a call – it doesn’t have a lovely safe green ‘Go’ button like the old one, with a corresponding red ‘Stop’ button to finish. I know that with mobiles if you don’t hang up properly the other person can’t get a clear line to make other calls – all they get is you still. So how do you do this? The handbook doesn’t say. And ‘free’? I don’t suppose they’ll send us a new in-car charger to replace the one we’ve bought and is soon to be totally useless.