Does life get more frustrating as you get older? Do retirement frustrations become more common? My mobile phone is broken. Now you know you’re in trouble when you can’t even define what broken means. I seem to have sat on it and broken the screen. Well that’s clear enough yes, but it’s been broken like that for literally years and worked fine. Now it’s like that, only more so.
No problem there’s a little shop nearby that repairs phones and screens although whether this is the same thing I’ve no idea. And the other problem is it’s closed and there’s no opening times on the door. (Sod’s law is it’s open when we drive past well into Plan D).
OK plan B, I’ll go back to O2 in the local shopping centre where I bought the phone in the first place. Mrs Summerhouse drops me off and will pick me up. No I don’t need a coat even though it’s raining because I won’t be walking far. Wrong. The shop is closed (I’ll return to this in a moment) and I can’t ring Mrs SH to come and pick me up because my phone is broken. I walk home in the rain and so having time to wonder how I was going to call her if my phone was still broken and I hadn’t bought a new one. Never mind.
I get home and decided on plan C – check out whether Argos sell mobile phones. They do. They’re all Sim free. You probably know what this means I did not. I Google it. It means you have to provide your own Sim card. This is good because I want to transfer my old one.
But can I do this? Yes, according to Google, providing it’s not locked. Is mine locked? Well maybe because O2 lock their phones but on further checking they may have stopped doing this now. I’m slightly lacking in confidence because this is the company who says on line that the shop I have just visited is closed for refurbishment. Fair enough I think until I look more closely at the dates of closure – 01.04.22. until 01.04.23. Just the year then but hang on, that doesn’t start until the 1st of April and it’s now the end of February. Hmm, I find myself somewhat lacking in confidence with O2.
I had prepared myself for irritations but true to form when you try to get ahead they change the rules. I had expected the troubles to be in the shop with them trying to sell me something I didn’t want or not being able to keep the same deal. It’s happened before with this lot. But no, I didn’t even get to first base. I couldn’t even get into the shop to be frustrated.
So where am I? I can visit the shop down the road and see if my phone is repairable. I can drive to Argos having chosen my new phone from their Sim free selection (all of them) providing this transfer of Sim card will work or, we can all drive into Leeds to visit their main branch (Plan D) and roll out my irritation-free strategy in a different setting. This will pretty much take up the whole day and I have this blog to write.
And talking of writing this blog it will be no surprise to you when I say broken mobiles was not the intended topic. It was meant to be an upbeat retirement blog about the nice Sunday we had yesterday but now life has steam-rollered that plan quite flat.
OK reporting back on plan D. At one point it looked like it was going to be a perfect operation. We drive into Leeds and park up. I walk to the shop, a nice lady asks if she can help me. I say I want a new phone but there are certain parameters. She takes this in her stride. I say – less than £100; a bigger screen (and hence phone); able to transfer Sim card from old phone; same deal with internet provider; bigger memory (not difficult I would have thought). I think that was all.
And we did great until the very last hurdle. You know the one, that’s the one you fall at. And fall we did because when the old Sim card was inserted in its new home, it said – no contacts (or photos). Bugger, and we were doing so well. Something to do with not having saved these files to the Sim card but rather to the phone itself and so, as it’s broken, are now irretrievable, gone for ever. As I say, I repeat, bugger, that means I will have to re-enter all my previous contacts and my photos are gone. Bugger
Retirement frustrations summary
So I don’t suppose I’ve answered my self-imposed question at the beginning of this retirement blog. I have to admit as technology and I go, in the end it was all relatively painless. Apart from being £100 worse off and minus all my contacts and photos. I’m now trying to understand my new phone which of course has some key differences to my old one but c’est la vie, I suppose.