The ‘terror’ of not being able to text !
Posted by Big John on July 12, 2012
My friend Ramana has recently posted about the use of mobile phones and in the past I have commented on people’s addiction to smartphones and texting, so I was interested to read that the O2 service in the UK ‘crashed‘ yesterday for several hours.
Now I know that this must have caused great inconvenience to many users and a loss of business to some companies, but why was I not surprised when I heard some silly cow young woman being interviewed on the TV news describe the temporary loss of her mobile ‘phone service as …
… “FRIGHTENING” !
rummuser said
Yes, it is frightening like being without booze for the alcoholic.
SilverTiger said
I understand her sentiments perfectly and see nothing ridiculous in them. Mobiles are now an essential tool in our lives and when essential tools fail to work you can left left in difficulties or even in danger.
There was a serious outage of the Orange service recently in France. There, though, the government took it more seriously than ours did and at least two government ministers became involved. There is a realization there of how central mobile services now are to everyday life.
If you don’t feel the need for a mobile yourself, fine, don’t use one. But don’t let this mislead you into thinking that the use of mobiles of somehow a trivial pursuit and a waste of time. For many people they are essential and for others their social lives have been immensely enriched by their use.
grannymar said
How did we ever manage years ago? First off we needed to have a pocket full of pennies in case we needed to make a phone call. Then we needed to walk down the street to find a phone box before dialling each digit on a heavy rotary dial, or call the operator to dial the number for us, put our pennies in the slot and press button A.
After all that we seldom talked beyond the pips at 2.8 minutes!
Big John said
As I said ‘Tiger’… “I know that this must have caused great inconvenience to many users and a loss of business”, and of course mobiles are “essential tools” to some but how can a ‘glitch’ in the system be … “Frightening” ? = ‘causing fear or dread or terror’. Try waiting for the next bomb to drop … Now that is bloody FRIGHTENING ! ;-)