Boys' toys

I haven't really been doing much posting recently, for reasons of which I'm not sure but perhaps real life is intruding a bit on virtual life!

Right now I'm off alcohol, ostensibly having given it up for Lent but really as an excuse to lose some weight and gain some health, although aware that Sundays don't actually count as Lent I've sort of decided that I won't drink during the week (on school nights as it were) but will allow myself some booze at the weekend.  Having got royally pissed after the RSCM Scottish Voices singing day last week I haven't had a drink since last Saturday, but this evening I've enjoyed, thoroughly enjoyed, a bottle of red wine, so tomorrow after evensong I don't plan on drinking.

At Glasgow Chamber Choir rehearsals, the lighting in the church being pretty poor, we use a couple of sets of floodlights on tripods, and while I was setting them up and putting out chairs on Thursday I leaned against a chair which when I got home later realised broke the screen on my mobile handset which was in the pocket of  my jeans.  I was, to say the least, not pleased.  With over a month to go until the earliest I can upgrade with Vodafone, and with a couple of months until the end of my contract and therefore when I could port my number to a different network, I was faced with the prospect of resurrecting an old handset and using it for a while.  On the offchance though I researched mobile handsets at work (fortunately my job involves having a fair bit of technical knowledge of mobile telephones so I could justify this research, just about) and I had narrowed my choices down to an Apple i-Phone and a Nokia N97 Mini.

So yesterday after work I visited the Vodafone shop in Braehead shopping centre.  The staff in the shop couldn't help, but told me that their customer services might be able to, and directed me towards a dedicated landline in the shop from where I could contact them.  To cut a longer story slightly shorter, despite the quietest line in the world whereby I could almost not hear the guy in customer services, I was allowed to upgrade early and I am now the owner of a brand new Nokia N97, which won over the i-Phone mostly because the i-Phone got a fair number of negative reviews about its connectivity, and since I'm not a slave to fashion I decided that making and receiving calls on a mobile phone was paramount, with all the extras being secondary!

So one day later I'm fairly happy with my new phone, although to be brutally honest I like my broken Nokia E66 better.  But the main thing is that I'm very impressed with Vodafone.  I was fully expecting being told that they couldn't upgrade me early, and whilst I'm only doing so about two months early and those two months are being added to the end of my new 18 month contract, they demonstrated what for me was good customer relations.  Well done Vodafone.