We remain amazed that the second largest Internet-Phone provider would advise a long time customer to try and put the mini wi-fi in the garden. After almost 2 years being bound to an E960 wireless system combining Internet and free phone we increasingly were dropping out and were advised to go for the mini wi-fi. We duly received this new device and were originally ecstatic that finally our problems would be solved

. Of course, after so many years of having survived life in general, we ought to by now have grown up with enough savoir sine qua non to know that problems are a permanent part of life just like the annual weeds popping up on the foot-path or having to cut ones toenails. The problem with all businesses is that they want to sell and make profits, and in the process all honesty and morals are chucked aside.

We always wondered why they did not advice us just to get a cable connection, surely that should have been a first option. ? No, all the time, hour after hour, day after day, we dealt with heavily accented technical Philippine or Chinese experts who inevitably advised us to try this and click on that, upgrade to something else.

Finally after years of wrangling we were ready to throw in all and hurl ourselves into the local creek, when it finally came out that a normal cable connect telephone service wasn’t available from that provider in our street or area. That’s what it was all about. They did not want to lose out on a customer.

In the meantime, as if Internet and phone services had not got us into enough trouble already, I signed up with a Friendly Aussie Phone Co on a mouth watering touch-screen free phone with $ 100.- free credit every month. I could not loose, especially when I don’t use the mobile service much at all. For some reason, getting older involves getting less calls and also making less calls. Perhaps many of similar age(d) by then have given up or are dozing off somewhere in a park or library pretending to brush up on Patrick White literature or a foreign language…

I get my first account from the friendly Aussie  Phone Co for $79. – And a horrendous list of numbers with extraordinary charges per second. I kept getting ‘missed calls’ necessitating me ringing back on this ‘free mobile’. It transpires that reception or ‘coverage’ as they like to call it isn’t very good here. This results in calls being listed as ‘missed calls’ whenever someone has the temerity to call us. I drive somewhere were ‘coverage’ is normal and I get this list of missed calls. I phone back ‘on the ‘free mobile’, and get charged per second. I am now ‘locked’ in with this friendly provider for two years, can’t even get another mobile service without a court case or a new mobile number. A blind rage is sometimes welling up now.

It’s all so hopelessly complicated. Remember when a phone was something hanging from the wall? Now, almost everyone is hooked on fiddling with a device with tiny knobs or, in case of a touch screen, swiping and splaying fingers across a little square. All eye contact is avoided and conversation stifled. Six out of every eight pedestrians meet up with cars while fiddling with a device. We truly are connected.

I sometimes feel like joining the mini wi-fi underneath the Hebes or go out and strangle a sheep…