This is a rant about
- Complex system
- Specific user requirements
- Unhelpful salesmen
- Carphone Warehouse
- Call Centres
- Crap User Interfaces
- Hotmail
- Difficult things that ought to be easy
- Power requirements of over-specced devices
- The Post-wristwatch life
Modern technology ought to be great, but its broken, modern technology, all of it. It was a simple enough request, if I review gigs in the future, I want it to be an easier process than it has been for the past year. Instead of scribbling in a notebook during the show, then typing up my notes on my computer when I get home, I want to be write the review on my mobile phone, and send it straight to my blog.
I can send text messages with my phone already, its a simple and easy process, I do it about twice a week. I use my mobile phone for little else, if she's lucky my mum gets a phonecall once a fortnight. This is my current situation. No endless streams of messages to friends, no multi-hour phonecalls to girlfriend, no business calls, no use.
On average I spend £10 a month on mobile phone credit, probably less, but for calculations herein, I'll assume £10.
So, I finally bite the bullet and walk into a mobile phone shop. Carphone Warehouse.
Lets be clear, I don't want a contract, I'm not going to pay it. If my phone runs out of credit, I may go for weeks before I can be arsed topping up, that's okay, it costs me nothing if I'm not using it. With a contract, they'd take the money anyway, and if I try to cancel it, and move house, there's this whole waste of everyone's time, money, energy trying to track me down. No contracts for me with mobile phones.
So, chap in Carphone Warehouse, explains that if I want to stick with Pay As You Go, and sticking with my current provider, T-Mobile, it kind of limits my options. And I don't want to spend much money. In fact, the only phone that can really do it is the Sony Erikson K800i, for £90.
It has 3G internet access and I can surf the net apparently. I don't want to, I just want to send emails. I don't even want to check emails, I just want to send them. But no, full internet access it is.
At this point, the sales chap, explains he can get YouTube on his phone. This doesn't help me at all. I've seen YouTube, its on my computer, if I had a TV, I'd be able to watch similar things on that too, I have an iPod Nano, I can watch the same shit on that too. I just want to send emails with my phone.
3G internet access doesn't come cheap, on pay as you go, you can get it for £1 a day on the days you use it. Fine. The calculations in my head go like this
£5.00 - ticket for gig
£5.00 - booze at gig
£1.00 - cloakroom
£1.00 - internet on mobile phone.
However, Carphone Warehouse Sales man explains that if I get some kind of contract with them, which works out to be £22 a month, I get the phone for free, and 500 free texts and 30mins free talking. If I did the complicated sums, it does work out cheaper than just buying the phone, and I just want an easy life. I just want to acquire the ability to send emails from my phone and get the hell out of the shop. So I agree to this contract.
They need my debit card, sure.
They need my address, not sure why, but hey, if it gets me out of the shop quicker, who cares, I'm not going to be staying at the address for long anyway.
They need my previous address, sure, I don't live there, I don't give a crap.
They need some other form of ID, such as my driving licence, why? In case I'm not who I claim I am, not sure why this is required. If I've stolen someone else's identity, why should my mobile phone provider care? But heck, I want to get out of the shop and so far this is the only way possible.
Alas, there is a problem validating my card or some details and we wait for something on the computer.
We wait, I get bored. The sales chap says I could go out and carry on with my shopping and he'll phone me when it comes through, shouldn't be long.
An hour later I return to the shop, and we are still waiting. The sales chap phones up the bank financial type provider and gets put on hold. He has to deal with other Carphone Warehouse customers, so I'm put in charge of waiting by his phone for the bank financial type providers to finally come to the phone.
I wait, time passes.
An hour and a half later, nothing has happened, so I tell the chap to cancel the contract credit thing, I'll just pay for the phone with my credit card and stick with pay as you go. It'll be marginally more expansive, but I just want to get my emailability and get out.
The phone, to get the cheapest deal, comes with an O2 sim card with £10 credit. I can just use that up and chuck it away when I'm finished, sticking my old T-Mobile sim card in the phone. And with that, I'm skipping into the car park with my new phone, two hours after I walked in.
----
I have a hotmail email account, I have done since I started uni, getting on for over a decade now. Its served me well, until recently when my home internet access appears to be blocking my access to MS Windows Live, Hotmail, MSN messenger and so forth.
Its driving me slightly suicidal with frustration. I could be spending the evenings chatting to people, arranging to go for coffee, or to the cinema, just friendy type stuff, the healthy relationships that elf recommends.
So, using the O2 sim card in the new phone, and simple instructions, I can access the internet, its a slow process, with many clicks, but easy, I can check my Hotmail, and log on to MSN messenger or whatever its called these days. I can look at naked women too.
So, to be daring, I tried sending an email from the hotmail webpage. Its a slow and painful thing, I had to log in every single time, the predictive text isn't quite the same as my old Nokia phone, but after plugging away for about twenty minutes, I fired off a hello world test missive to myself.
It worked. But sadly, its too slow and clunky to use in a gig reviewing situation, compared to both
a) scribbling in my notebook
b) writing a text message using my old phone
I believe the leet/webspeak for this situation is
FAIL
Luckily, the phone has an email option in its message application, rather than using the web. Trying not to consider just yet that the chap at the Carphone Warehouse has fucked me over. I didn't want to set up my email on the phone right then if it's tied to some disposable O2 account. So I swap over sim cards to my T-Mobile one, which kind of works right away. No need to unlock the phone or anything.
Sadly I have no credit on my T-Mobile sim card. It was late, the shops were closed, I couldn't be arsed walking to the cash machine to top-up there and damn their eyes, I can't top-up on the T-Mobile website because that site seems to be blocked by my home internet provider.
When I moved into this place I'm staying at, the wireless broadband was AOL, kind of, and possibly BT too, at the same time. That was many months ago, and now, when I do an IP address lookup thing on myself, it says my internet access is provided by Carphone Warehouse.
I've spent too long with them already, I'm going to waste no more time or money with Carphone Warehouse. I have no contract, I have a phone, which should have the functionality I wanted.
I just want to send email from my phone (quickly and easily)
The quickly and easily caveat is now significant. Already at gigs I carry my regular phone, my notebook, several pens, and a digital camera. I don't want to have to carry two phones just to be able to send that email gig review when its painful to have to log on to hotmail every time.
The next day, Sunday in fact, its my niece's birthday, and I get to see my brother, he'sfar more patient with call centres and he knows about mobile phones. Whilst I want all this to be quick and easy, he has either lead a charmed life and has managed to get email, google earth, photo albums and everything on his phone or he makes it look easy.
He quickly realises I could have stuck with my old phone and just phoned up T-Mobile to enable internet on my old phone, and I ought to return my new Sony Erikson to the Carphone Warehouse. Luckily he's known me long enough to go with the flow when I say there's no way on earth I am ever returning to Carphone Warehouse, I'm going to keep the new phone and damn them.
So we phone T-Mobile, but if we want to speak to an actual person to get the internet thing enabled, it will cost 25p. So back we go online using a laptop and Top-Up using the T-Mobile site, and we get to enable the internet access online.
Soon the phone springs into life, a text comes through saying I can go online with it.
Its a lie, of course, the damned thing no longer connects to the internet as it did the night before when I had the O2 sim card.
Hours pass, with my brother on the phone talking to various T-Mobile call centre folk. He has an unnerving way of actually remembering the first name they give and then calling them that throughout the call. "So Karen, do you mean that you've taken £2.50 of my credit to enable web access, but without actually giving my phone web access?"
Again, the phone provider seems to require my address and my previous address. We check online, the last time I had any kind of documented contract, even pay as you go, with T-Mobile, it expired in 2000.
Eventually the call centre chap called 'Chris' suggests removing the phone's battery and doing a hard reboot, and as if by magic modern technology once again allows me to access the internet, the world wide web indeed, using my mobile phone.
Having established that sending an email from hotmail its too fucking tedious on the mobile, I try to access my blog directly. Its just as painful to log into, and strangely I can't type a blog entry. I can see the page in very small writing, but can't select the field to write in.
Hotmail, having served me well for so many years, has failed me. It don't let me do POP3, I can't send or check my emails outwith the internet, unless I pay them more money. Nope.
So, I open a gmail account, or googlemail as I think its called. Learn myself a new email address, and a new password, as if my life isn't complicated enough. Enter the POP3 server details into the new phone and try sending an email, written quickly and easily, like a text message.
That was two hours ago. The painful process of checking my hotmail account shows it hasn't come through.
I've spent £110 and nine hours on this so far, with not enough success to call it a success. According to the average of half a dozen IQ tests I've taken, my IQ is 125, or if you ignore the one I took when drunk, horny and very tired in Strathclyde Uni's library in 2001, my IQ is 138.
How come sending an email from a mobile phone is so difficult. Which bit did I get wrong? I don't understand it. All I can assume, until otherwise corrected, is that modern technology is broken. Some fuckwits cocked it up, and broke technological progress.
I read Engadget five times a day, and the stuff on there looks pretty neat, but I am 100% certain its not going to work. Sure it will work for some people, under exceptional circumstances, but generally, its not going to work. The fucky computer will crash, the cheap computer will be unusable, the thin TV will crack, the HD TV will have a worse picture than the old TV and the mobile phone of the future will be impossible to use.
Prove me wrong.
UPDATE
A few other guys at work have the same phone, they seem happy enough with it, they can use it, I've seen them. It proves that my phone isn't that crap, its just its not suited to my purposes.
But there are some other things I've noticed sinc eI stayed up last night writing this.
The battery on my new phone has run down to about 10%. Now when I was in the shop yesterday and showed the salesman my old phone, he was amazed that I was satisfied with its battery life, even after having it for several years. Alas, all that fiddling with the internet yesterday is too much for the new phone, and if I use it for the purpose I acquired it for, then the battery life is inadequate.
Another thing, I'm 29 years old, and during those years I've own around twenty different wristwatches. I haven't worn one for about five years now, but before then I'd go through them very quickly. I didn't lose all twenty of them, its just the strap broke on some, or I grew tired of taking it off and putting it bck on, I'd get a new cheap casio one in the hope it would inspire me to integrate it into my life, but all without any success.
Luckily, until this weekend, I had a Nokia phone, it had the phone on it, and as it was lozenge shaped, I could slip it quickly and easily out of my pocket, and, if the light was good, I could see what time it was without pressing any buttons, and then easily slip it back into my pocket.
Welcome to the post-wristwatch life, its a blissful multifunction world.
My new phone, the Sony Erikson K800i, is not so good. I'd never realised this before, but telling the time is the second on third most important function of a mobile phone to me. The Sony Erikson, its more block shaped and doesn't come out of my pocket as easily. When its in power save mode, the display is blank, so I need to press buttons to wake it up and see what time it is. I don't always want to make calls, send text messages, send emails or look at damned videos on YouTube or for that matter fucking videos on YouPorn.
I just want to know what time it is.
Too much to ask.
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