Another week in Malaga

Well, the promised replacement SIM card to go with my replacement phone didn't turn up until today's post. After an afternoon in the office on Monday, I visited the EE shop in Grand Arcade and bought a new Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini, the same size as my lost phone but a lot quicker and easier to read, with an improved brighter sharper screen. My account details and number were transferred to the SIM in the new phone and I was told it would be active in four hours. I went to bed at midnight and it was still impossible to use as a phone, although it was useable via wi-fi to access the internet, and most of my contact details and phone numbers were added from the Samsung Kies backup programme. A pity the backup was several months old, so a few newer numbers needed adding by hand. A fiddly job.

Tuesday morning fifteen hours after purchase, still no phone, and my Orange internet account told me that it was still blocked. So I borrowed Clare's phone to ring up, and within minutes a helpful call centre guy had unblocked the account and made sure that all was in order. So, the guy who sold me the phone in the EE shop thought that he'd done all the right things, but seems to have missed something decisive in the complex procedure. Funnily enough the same thing happened last time I bought a phone. It's not a good advertisement for the service. Oh yes, and the SIM card mailed to me arrived on Tuesday. Should I now send it back?

With an evening flight to Malaga again, I had a leisurely day to prepare. Strangely for me, I packed most of what I intended to take on Tuesday evening, yet when I arrived at Bristol Airport I remembered that I'd not packed a toothbrush, or the Spanish grammar and phrase books. The more relaxed I get about travel, it seems the more careless about the detail I get - like forgetting to add Fr Geoff's mobile number to my new phone so that I could text him to say I was on my way. I had the bright idea as I was sitting in the very back row of the aeroplane waiting to be told to switch off everything electronic, of texting Clare and asking her to ring him before he left home to go to the airport. She did, but had no luck getting through. 

Thankfully Fr Geoff trusted that all was well though we hadn't spoken for a while. He and Carol were there to meet me. Being in the back row was not only the most uncomfortable flight I can recall, as the seat space is a little smaller in the corner, I was also one of the last off the plane, then there was a fifteen minute queue to get through passport control, and a long walk to the arrivals gate. By the time we sank into armchairs with a late night beer in the Vicarage at Nerja it was quarter to one, with a good hour's more catchup talk before surrendering to sleep.

  

Smart but not so smart

I went into the office again today at lunch time to finish off work on the business plan and circulate it. A parcel arrived in the mail from British Telecom. It was meant to have come yesterday along with a replacement phone for Ashley, but the promised item didn't turn up. The BT help line worker swore it had been mailed - a computer said so after all. In the ensuing investigation, prompted by Ashley nagging them, a store keeper was dispatched to check reality against the computer record and found our unsent package. Apparently the office work isn't done in the place from where goods are distributed, indeed the office work isn't always done in the office, as some of BT's staff work from home. Remote administration clearly has its draw backs.

Anyway the missing parcel was a freebie, part of a bigger compensation package for the messes made serially during out three office re-locations over the past two years. We'd asked for a SIM card that could link my phone to the CBS BT account, to replace my PAYG package for work purposes. BT gave us an expensive Blackberry Bold plus a SIM card. Now I'm faced with having to get used to a bright new piece of technology with an unfamiliar user interface and a keyboard equally as fiddly as an on screen virtual keyboard. And I'm only just about accustomed to that after six months of use.

The Blackberry is great at internet functions and has copied both my email contact lists into its memory and merged them, which means I  have scores of double entries as the two accounts have gradually overlapped over years of accidental misuse. How on earth I get my real working phone directory from one set to the other I have yet to work out. There a few phone numbers in either of my Gmail contact lists, as I have never needed to use them to store numbers. So, I have a big mess to sort out before I go much further.

These big smart clever guys only think they know what we insignificant if paying users want to do with our data, and always give us too many options, confusingly presented, therefore time wasting, therefore less than useful. I confess that I am deeply ungrateful for these anonymous efforts to hog my time with menial tasks. We were better off when we used just a paper note book to store our numbers and made the effort to look them up and dial each time, but I don't think we realise it, as we've got used to be enslaved by inflexible information systems.

As I was on my home from work Ashely and I spoke on the phone about something I'd forgotten to tell him earlier, He told me there was an emergency in progress with streets blocked off after someone had run amok in a white van and knocked people over in several different locations. The seriousness of this only became apparent when I got home and listened to the news before heading off to St Luke's to say the evening Mass. It had happened only a mile or so up the road from church. Although we didn't know any detailed information, we offered the Mass for all involved, aware of the disturbing impact this would have, especially on Glanely's Parish Church of the Resurrection, our nearest neighbour in Canton.