Mobile madness

I guess this is a blog of two halves. Firstly I want to moan about customer service, this has been prompted by a recent blog my esteemed blogging associate, read here for her moan. Basically my mobile phone broke back in January so I sent it to a place I’d dealt with before in Wimbledon. Having made a phone call to them and explaining the problem I sent them my phone and sort of expected it within a scant few days, however I didn’t get it back till 7th May. In the end I gave up ringing as I got the usual excuses – ‘we are trying to source parts’ – ‘we need to do something else as the last thing didn’t work’. I reverted back to my old black and white Nokia and revelled in the nostalgia and simple reliability of it. So three months passed until I got a call (I’d given up chasing them) saying my phone was fixed and would cost £120, of course I got that figure down straight away pointing out all the time they’d had to do the job. They said parts had been ordered from China but when I’ve ordered things from Hong Kong they’ve arrived within about 4 days so I wasn’t buying their excuses. To cut a long story short I paid for the repair and got the phone back the next day, the thing is it had been gone so long it didn’t feel like my phone anymore, not only that I’d been out and bought another one that I really liked and felt comfortable with. I ended up selling the phone on to a friend but was left totally disillusioned with British customer service (then again what do you expect with southern workmanship!!!). The second bit of the blog is about mobile phones in general and the evil power they exact over us. Have you ever lost your mobile and felt lost, naked, anxious? The sad and ironic thing is we are lost without them, they’ve become an electrical extension of our own bodies. As the months pass new models come out that do more and more, it’s just getting plain scary. Each new generation becomes more dependant on them, on a recent visit to my dad’s I hid his mobile as a joke and watched him flap and panic till I gave it him back . You see people on buses and trains busily texting, playing games or simply just talking loud so every looks at their new phone. One of my workmates made a good point by saying if a company made a simple mobile that just made calls and texts it would be popular because many people simply just want that without all the extra’s! Sadly though I am a gadget freak who’d feel naked without his mobile but I often wonder what the future holds and how scary it could be!