Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Proud To Be A Dinosaur: Don't you hate these 'on-spec' telephone calls? Double glazing. Mobile phones. Car insurance. Pay off your credit card bills.
Our landline number once belonged to someone else, and although it's been ours for 16 or 17 years, people still call asking for the previous owner, who lives 3 miles away.
One such WAS a double glazing company, I told them he didn't live here and never had. And then the caller asked if I would like any double glazing? Trying to get business on the back of ringing someone else annoyed me, and I told the caller so and hung up.
The classic was someone asking if we needed a stair lift. It gave me great pleasure saying we live in a bungalow.
Last evening, a well-mannered young chap with a good sense of humour, selling mobile phones, called. He could not believe how old my Nokia was, and that I put £10 on it last November, for the Motorhead tour, and still had about £8 credit on it today.
Our landline barely gets used, so why do I or we (Mrs. B) need to spend £35+ a month EACH on a mobile? (Plus leccy charging them). Do people really want to talk that much, or is having 'the latest' phone just a status symbol? (I thought history dictated husbands and wives ignored one another? Now they want to talk all the time?)
I told him people seemed to call one another to tell them they had just passed wind. He laughed. But why do a couple need to pay almost a £grand a year texting and phoning each other, or friends and family, when they usually see them face to face later in the day / week, and can ask them in person, for free? Perhaps they've got a bad memory? Perhaps I've got a good one? If I've forgotten what it was I needed to say when I meet the person, then it can't have been that important, anyway.
The classic, which this chap laughed at when I told him, was on that 'Beat The Bailiff' TV programme. As ever, this couple were drowning in debt, but the show's presenter found out that: The bloke would be upstairs playing on the X-Box, and he'd text downstairs asking his Mrs to bring him up a drink. And She texted him back asking what drink he wanted? Utter madness!
Mobile / cell phones are knockout in an emergency, but an expensive luxury for the rest of the time, which is 99% of it. But some people couldn't live without them, and they have become quite an addiction, and there's always someone fiddling with theirs wherever you happen to go.
But hey, let's face it, I'm in the minority; a dinosaur who would prefer spending that £grand a year on a holiday rather than making the mobile phone millionaires even richer.