Melbourne Herald Sun, May 2, 2013
There's a horrible sinking feeling when you lose your mobile phone. You search and search, running late for an appointment.
You go to the usual places: bedside table, study, kitchen bench, car. Not there, so you visit all those sites again, as if you could have overlooked a large black block of electronics.
You shake out the weekend's papers, the junk mail in the discard box, crawl under the bed, under the desk, under the couch. All sound tensely familiar? You borrow your partner's phone to ring, wondering whether your phone was properly charged last time, listening for a muffled tinkle.
Meanwhile, said partner has joined in and is offering a string of helpful advice which you take out of despair. Eventually it does turn up - in last night's suit pocket or forgotten in the children's room when you said goodnight. A huge wave of relief as you clutch the precious instrument. You are never going to do that again!
Until the next time you lose it. Only this time - after seven years in my case - it really is lost. Gone, disappeared, never to be seen again. All the hunting and panicking are to no avail.
You expect that some kind soul will find it where it dropped - perhaps while pulling a jacket on after a run in the park. Maybe they will ring a couple of numbers in memory to track down the owner. Or take it to a mobile shop where the savvy assistants will soon uncover its home.
But no, some phones just stay lost and you are faced with catastrophe. You know all the backups you have been making for years? No, you didn't back up? No-one ever showed you how?
What about the names, addresses and numbers of those important business prospects. Not the existing customers, there's plenty of data on them, but the ones you put in the phone that one time you met them. There's now a huge directory of contacts. Work, business, family, friends, clubs, members of this and that - they're all sitting in that little machine.
Oh I haven't started yet. Now you have to choose a new phone. This is exciting. There are so many new wonderful models on the market right now, as I've often reported here. But what one's right for you?
Basically, with all the plans and programs on offer, all the phones cost much the same - nothing. Point to the one you'd like and they'll give it to you. So are you finally going to cross Trendy Street to Apple? Or the new well-reviewed Galaxy? Stick to Nokia tried and trusted, swing to glamorous HTC, play corporate with BlackBerry? One thing you can be sure of - everything you learned about using a phone you'll have to learn over again.
The new phones have less buttons - you have to learn which bit of glass to tap to produce the result you want. I spent 15 minutes trying to turn off my new phone's alarm clock. Nothing I tapped would stop that brain-piercing drill. It took days to figure out basics like making and receiving calls - and the blurbs tell me of the thousands of apps available. Once I learn how to install them and use them.
I admit it, it's an age thing. The phone shop assistant looks like a schoolboy and when I explain what has been torturing me for the past week, he will tap a few keys I hadn't even noticed and fix it for me.
The moral is simple. Stick to what you know and whatever you do, don't lose that phone!
ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com
