Not to reinforce the no doubt commonly held view that I have serious sociability issues, but I feel it necessary to inform you all that I got very cross today. This is not unusual, as regular readers will be able to testify, neither is it unusual that I decide to try and work off some aggression by pounding the keyboard until I have told the none-too-interesting story. But be that as it may, here is today’s little rant.
The more dedicated among you may remember my annoyance last year when O2 repeatedly sent me texts begging me to top up. This was a minor annoyance at worst, but nonetheless it led me to destroy my phone in a fit of pique (okay, okay, I was playing Hungry Fish on it with a little too much enthusiasm), and as a result, I had to get a new one.
The idea of buying a new phone filled me with dread. I didn’t feel up to going into Carphone Warehouse or any of the other hideous shops while some technologically minded but socially stunted young man tried to tempt me into an iPhone, a piece of hardware against which I have taken an irrational dislike to without ever even touching one. So, instead of going into one of those shops, I persuaded my girlfriend to get a new phone herself, so I could buy her old one. Brilliant! You may all now bow to my genius.
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of explaining to those who care that I no longer have an O2 phone, and instead have sold my soul to Orange. I felt it necessary to explain this in case anyone read last year’s article, then read this one, and sent me angry emails saying things like, “You said you had an O2 phone, and now you’re saying you have an Orange one! How can I ever believe anything you say again?” An unlikely scenario, I admit, but certainly one I don’t want to happen.
I’d just like to digress at this point and say that as I write this, I am listening to Everything Everything on Spotify. Everything Everything were touted earlier this year as one of the UK’s hottest new talents, not just by NME (they say that about at least five different new bands every week), but by respectable music magazines as well. Anyway, if they are correct, I can only say that the music industry is in worse shape than I thought. I’m on Track 3 at the moment, and if it doesn’t improve by Track 5, it’s going off and I’m going back to Daphne and Celeste.
Anyway, so, on to my Orange phone. It’s slimline and pink and really rather effeminate, but you will recall I bought it off my girlfriend, so that’s excusable. It doesn’t, however, have Hungry Fish on it, which is not excusable. Having spent some months in therapy following the ignominious departure of Hungry Fish from my life, I emerged to experiment with the other options on my new phone.
Being an Orange customer, I am in a peculiar situation. I appreciate very much the fact that I can now go to the cinema with my girlfriend on a Wednesday without taking out a second mortgage (£7.40 for a cinema ticket? Really?), but equally, Orange invariably show one of their dreadful adverts while I’m at the cinema which I really do not like. The current one is Jack Black in Gulliver’s Travels strung up by Lilliputians shouting about not being a puppet, which is pretty hateful, though it is at least better than that one with Danny Glover smashing through a window and pretending to be upset, or something. Therefore, Orange basically have made it possible for me to go to the cinema and hate them.
For the record, Track 5 has just finished and Everything Everything is going off, never to be played again. I admit it doesn’t help their cause that Spotify hasn’t been working properly for the last 5 minutes (and now, irritatingly, is refusing to turn off or stop playing), but trust me, do not buy that album. I’m now trying Ghost of a Sabre Tooth Tiger instead, and shall keep you updated.
Right, so, back to Orange. The main problem I have with them is the same one I had with O2 – they send me infuriating text messages. Orange’s tack seems to be to try to tempt me into buying a new phone (ironic, really, given the only reason I’m with Orange now is because I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to buy a new phone), and they do this by sending me a monthly text saying something along the lines of “You’ve got £5 in your phone fund! Use it to buy a new phone.”
Now, everyone knows that £5 isn’t enough to buy a new phone, except obviously the cheapest of the cheap landline phones from the Mr Cheap is the Cheapest shop that adorns the top of Portsmouth high street. And I don’t think that Mr Cheap is the Cheapest accepts Orange phone fund as legal tender. But besides that, how does it work? How did I get £5 in my phone fund? How do I spend it? Do I just walk into Orange and flash this text before the assistant’s eyes? Or do – as seems more likely – have to go through endless registration forms and internet tomfoolery before I discover that I’m entitled to buy the new £1000 handset at the bargain bucket price of £995?
The basic implication in Orange’s endless pleading to make me buy a new phone is that the existing one I have is not good enough. And in this, they’re dead right. It has the irritating feature of not having a confirm button on text messages, resulting in me sending half-finished messages that make me sound either relentlessly cheery (“Hello Mother!”), incapable of lucid thought (“Hi Carl! Are you”) or just like I’m brusque to the point of rudeness (“We are pleased”) . But the problem is that Orange made this phone, and now they’re suggesting none-too-subtly that it’s not good enough. They may be right, but the fact that they sold me an extremely poor phone once and then tacitly admit it only inspires me never to buy anything from them again.
I would like to finish this little discussion – unamusing as it has been – with two observations. One, I have recently discovered that Tesco are running a promotion with their phones, and I consider Tesco are unlikely to pester me quite so incessantly with texts, so I may well be getting a new phone number soon. And two, Ghost of a Sabre Tooth Tiger aren’t much good either.