Out of the loop

Last Friday morning just before 9am, while I was in the dentist's waiting room, my phone rang. I could be heard but could not hear. Oh dear. It had been playing up all week, ever since Monday but it was still serviceable. I managed to copy my phone directory to my sim card and about 3 hours later the thing completely died on me. I don't have a landline.

It has been a peculiar weekend. I used a public phone box for the first time in years and was shocked to find it now costs 40p minumum. For this you get 20 minutes. Fine, but who wants to be stuck behind someone making a 20 minute call in a call box. BT are removing them complaining that they are not being used. Of course they aren't , they're too bloody expensive. But they are for emergencies and should be maintained. I would have liked to have made several short calls but I wouldn't have been able to afford it. This is the moron Adam Crozier school of business thought: it's not used all the time, scrap it. Then two people want to use the last one at once, one gets angry at being held up and vandalises it. BT remove it because of the vandalism problem. There's such thing as a public service. This is the same with the post office: shut all the sub POs so everyone uses the main one. There are now queues at the main one almost all the time so everyone starts doing everything online (like printing stamps and getting the weights wrong, so the clerk told me) so the Post Offices are deemed unpopular or surplus to need. Shut them down.

Apart from not having a landline (or a telly. Have I told you that before?), I don't wear a watch either. I use my mobile and it serves as my alarm. I borrowed an alarm clock because I had to be up very early on Saturday morning but it was too loud and kept me awake all night even though I put it on the landing. I could have thrown it down the toilet. It was an old clockwork one (the clock, not my toilet), made in Scotland (when was the last time you saw "Made in Scotland" anywhere?) and went by the trade name "Jock". How quaint. The hands were out of sync so the alarm was impossible to set. It was a useless Jock (like Adam Crozier). I went to Argos and bought a cheap alarm clock for £4. Argos is the only place in the world where you can buy cheap alarm clocks that just tell the time and wake you up. Nobody needs them anymore because everyone has a mobile phone.

By far the worst part of the last few days has been the feeling of total isolation even though I live in a town of 50,000. I have been completely uncontactable and for the most part, been unable to contact anyone without spending a lot of money, something I don't have. I don't know my neighbour's phone numbers, I have no computer at home. I send texts, not to many people, just a select few. It's pseudo conversation and it stops me from feeling lonely, even though I'm not overtly gregarious. I never thought I would ever really miss my phone but I have. Thankfully my brother-in-law is sending me an old one which I should receive tomorrow - I can't wait, something I find rather sad. I gave my old mobile to my Dad, my mum uses my sister's old cast off. My mother has just started to text and thinks it's fun. Odd, it used to be clothes that were passed down, now we pass the latest technology the other way.