Getting with it

Old and new
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The other day I finally decided it was time to do something about my malfunctioning cellular phone which I had bought since early 2004. Over the past few months it was either always cutting off in mid conversation or there would be a strange noise and the message "Insert SIM" would pop up out of the blue and refuse to go away unless I dropped the phone on the floor, banged it against something or fiddled for ten minutes with the clasp for the SIM card, which was becoming progressively loose. Despite all of this I had never bothered to get a new phone ... until (recently) it started getting on my nerves as the problem worsened.

I set out to the Mall, intending to buy a new phone, when I showed my oldie to a man in a bMobile kiosk in the Mall, he told me I didn't have to buy a whole new phone. I could just get this one fixed. To cut a long conversation short, I ended up going to the relocated TSTT service centre (in the mall) to see if they could fix it.

The first person I encountered when I went in was a girl who used to go to school with me at SAGHS. After we exchanged hellos, I showed her my phone and said: "Can I get this fixed here?"

She looked at my phone and then at me with a mix of genuine horror and disbelief. "Oh gosh, Elspeth! Get with it! Move with the times!" She gestured to the sleek new phones in a nearby glass case and added that they don't fix phones there.

Holding my chunky, battered, light blue dinosaur in my hand I glanced at the three-figure prices and told her I wasn't going to pay a few thousand dollars for a phone when all I do with my cel is send and receive calls or texts. I don't need to check e-mails, take photos or download music with it.

The cheapest phone they had was the slim black $299 Samsung, which I ended up buying. The functions are different and I am slowly getting used to them. It's good to break out of the comfort zone of what we know/know how to do/know how to use and experience a learning curve ... even for something as simple as a phone.