A few months ago, I inherited an almost new mobile phone from my husband and was fairly delighted with myself. I managed to ply his fingers off this much-loved iPhone 6s after he got a new phone through work and really, I just knew it would be best for him to relieve him of this old phone. We all know that the 2-smartphone-shuffle is just not a good dance anymore.
I had a fairly good Samsung phone but it had started to give me jip, seizing up, not charging reliably, leaving me high and dry in a phoneless sort of way a few times. I was keen for change. And an iPhone 6s is one of those big trendy sleek phones that would just about be cool enough for me (according to me) and had a good camera. Oh yes, I was happy with this present I managed to wangle for myself through a small bit of concern for others and perseverance.
I took the phone for its inaugural walk on a sunny cold December day. We were down by the beach and of course, I had the phone out to take some photos. I was showing the photos to the kids afterwards and suddenly the unthinkable happened, THE PHONE DIED. There wasn’t even a respectable splutter or a last gasp of warning, it just went black and switched off leaving me in stunned astonishment. All attempts to resusitate yielded the phone version of the 2 fingers up, telling me to plug it into a socket or it was talking to no-one. It had 70% battery remaining.
So of course I turned to the husband and asked if, by any chance, he had given me a dodgy excuse for a phone. He huffed a bit with credible indignation and that vaguely disguised technical expert know-it-all-ness, “Well, that has never happened to me with that phone. Ever. What did you do to it? “. “I looked at it!” I replied somewhat articulately.
The phone came back to life on the way home in the car to much relief. It gave no explanation as to why it had opted out for a while.
It has done the same thing many times since, always when we are out in the cold. I took my daughter to the dentist a few weeks back and we hopped on the the wrong bus home. We ended up in the middle of a nowhere that we didn’t know, with, you’ve guessed it, a dead phone. We had to wait for darkness and the North Star to guide us home that night (not really but I like the idea). We finally found a tban station and made our way home, NO THANKS TO THE PHONE. You see, my travel tickets are also on the phone so it adds a level of stress when you have a dead phone on public transpost. Failure to show a valid ticket carries a 900 nok fine and probably 5 000 nok worth of annoyance and frustration.
It’s like the phone has just realised that it lives in cold Norway and is protesting in the only way it knows how, it plays dead. It only comes back to life if you hug it a lot and make it nice and warm. Sometimes, when it’s in a real mood, it doesn’t come back to life until it’s plugged in.
Suffice it to say that I started to develop an I love you but I don’t trust you sort of relationship with my mobile phone. My mother had warned me that we might all seize up and freeze to death when we moved to the cold north but I never heard of a phone going in to a coma with the cold. I am getting a clear signal that it wants to spend the winter months in Malaga but I’m being very firm, that’s just not going to happen.
So I now carry a battery charger at all times. My daughter has kindly offered to give me her hot water bottle to carry around with the phone to keep it happy. It’s a pink furry pig of a hot water bottle, too big for a pocket and a bit too heavy for my bag. So I’d probably need a wheelie case and then I could wrap everything in a woolly blanket to give extra insulation. It would only take me 15 minutes to answer a phone call.
I still love my phone and am determined to stand by it through all of this controversy. And besides, my son recently got his first phone, it’s a ca. 30 year old sturdy block of a Nokia. We thought it was a good idea so that we could ring him when he is out with his friends in the playground. However, the truth is that he uses it at weekends to ring us circa 50 times when he is out for a few hours, just to say Hi because apparently it’s good fun to call us.
So I know that phone doesn’t mind the cold. That’s my back-up. Retro is in, right?
