Phones and the Language Barrier.

I have a mobile phone, but I’m not a mobile phone sort of person. Accordingly, I use the cheapest little phone it’s possible to get (£15.99 from Tesco) because all I want it to do is make and receive calls and texts. I’m not a poking and stroking addict, and neither do I ever want to be. When I leave this earth I would like it to be said of me: ‘He died with his boots on, what teeth he had left were his own, and never once did he stoop to poking and stroking.’ Ah, but…

It was suggested to me when I was negotiating the rigours of changing provider that a modern SIM would probably work better in a modern phone designed for multi-G networks, whatever they are. And so I’ve been studying proper, modern phones on the Argos website and now I have problems.

For a start, the product information has obviously been written by people who lack even the most basic fluency in English. ‘Why should they be fluent in English?’ you might ask. ‘They have a language of their own and it’s a perfectly good language.’ ‘I know,’ I would answer, ‘but they’re trying to sell me a phone and English is the only language I know. So I’m not a polyglot. I’m inferior. I don’t care. I just want to know what I’m buying.’

The second problem is that the writers of the marketing blurb are transparently engaged in making a product which is tediously basic (judging by the price) sound like the latest in 22^nd century technology. But they’re doing it in a version of English which wouldn’t pass muster with a 5-year-old. So how on earth can I trust it?

And then there’s a third problem. I skip over the ludicrously overcooked hyperbole and concentrate solely on the technical stuff, but then I find that they use terms and abbreviations which are completely alien to me. I’m a simple, if rather reclusive, sort of chap who’s been using a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile for the past eighteen years and still thinks that waving it about in the supermarket is my passport to the world of normal people.

Clearly it isn’t. Clearly I need educating, but where do I go? To a mobile phone shop? Do we still have mobile phone shops? I expect we probably do, but then I would be faced, no doubt, with the prospect of dealing with some snotty young millennial who isn’t giving me his or her full attention because he or she is worrying about where I’ve left my walking frame in case somebody falls over it. Life and millennials can be cruel like that.

And so I ask you: is there any prospect of rescue, or must I live out what’s left of my sad little existence with a phone signal that washes gently in and out like the waves on a beach in Tahiti? (I expect they speak quite good English in Tahiti, but that’s little consolation.)

 

Incidentally, I don't have a walking frame (yet.) That was a joke.