Mobile Phones - Rant #3 (Part 2/2)

Sahl Hasheesh - Unsunk Part of Sunken City

OK, so I leave Switzerland with a different mobile phone from when I entered it. To be honest, I felt slightly relieved to be back on older technology. The new mobile had a camera and I was happy with that.

However, once in the UK and snapping merrily away , I discovered that my new phone could take only a maximum of 12 photographs without a memory card. Also, I couldn’t work out how to take the back off, so I couldn’t insert my UK sim card. In retrospect, it might have helped if I’d have read the instructions.

Anyway, I decided to go to a shop, buy a memory card and ask them to insert it. I could then watch them take off the cover. Great plan!

It turned out that the shop had run out of memory cards, but the guy serving did put in my UK sim for me. To my intense joy, he struggled to get the back of the phone off, although I worried about how I would ever cope. He also took a long time to insert the sim card, so once again I was glad I didn’t go near it myself.

I went out of the shop, tried the phone, but the sim card wasn’t working properly. Frustration!

So, off I went to yet another mobile phone shop. This wasn’t how I’d intended spending my holiday! The guy there informed me that the UK sim wouldn’t work because the phone was blocked to take only my Swiss sim card. They could unblock it for 30 GBP in three days. I decided it would be cheaper in Egypt, so I bought just the memory card, which he installed.

Consequently, I returned to Egypt with a mobile phone unable to work in the country in which I live. This definitely hadn’t been on my shopping list!

I needed to be able to use my Egyptian sim straightaway (Hye-Youn had retrieved it from my smart phone and posted it), since it’s expensive for Esmat and others to receive international calls (I had to use facebook in the mean time to order the taxi into town). So, once in Egypt, I was again visiting a mobile phone shop. This really isn’t me.

The woman in the shop said they couldn’t unblock my phone but could sell me a cheap mobile. She offered me the one I’d just bought. It turned out there was a cheaper version with the same features, so I got that, no longer caring since I had mentally completely given up. I just needed to be able to phone Esmat.

Annoyingly, I discovered later, by comparing the two sets of instructions to the two very similar mobile phones, that the original basic phone wasn’t blocked at all and was a dual sim card phone; I had no need to buy an extra mobile and no need to unblock it. It appears to have been a complete lie in the UK shop that the phone was blocked.

I read somewhere that there are more mobile phones than there are people; it’s hardly surprising if even someone who hates mobile phones ends up with three of them and the people serving in the shops don’t know what they’re doing (or maybe they are just corrupt). It’s all one big conspiracy! Still, at least now I could phone within Egypt and get about without worrying about how to contact Esmat.

Next, I wanted to transfer the 12 photos I’d taken on the original basic mobile phone to the memory card. I popped out the memory card from the newest phone, but then I couldn’t for the life of me get it back into either of the Nokias. It just kept springing out, however hard I pushed down with my fingers. I looked at the instructions, but they just said “push it in”. I may have learnt from my mistake of not reading instructions, but reading instructions now didn’t help me!

I looked it up on the internet, but it seemed to be a non-existent problem unless there was something stuck inside the slot. However, both phones were new. It seemed unlikely. Also, I was able to use the memory card on my laptop, so the memory card wasn’t at fault.

In the end, I had to go back to the shop in Egypt and ask them how to insert the memory card. I think the man serving me thought I was a bit strange, and he managed to pop in the card straight away. He looked at me and shrugged as if to say “What’s the problem?” 

I asked to try and then demonstrated how it didn’t work for me, at which point he informed me that I needed to use my nails (thankfully he spoke very good English). Why couldn’t it say that in the instructions? Am I really the first person ever to have this problem?

I’ve now calmed down a bit. I feel a little happier with the simpler phone and if my old phone really is broken, then maybe it’s easier to have one phone for UK and Egypt and another for Switzerland. I still need to fiddle about a bit – I have my current phone so that both sims are operational and I’m getting messages from Vodafone from both sims (sometimes up to 9 messages at a time), which is annoying, so I need to work out how to disable the UK sim for now. I did see something somewhere about that.

Let’s hope this is the end of my mobile phone rants!