17/03/2008 by admin.

Are my family and I the unluckiest mobile phone users or what? The most bizarre accidents have happened.

Six year ago I went on holiday and I stood by the sea wall, looking over the edge and the sea crashing against the rocks below. I put my phone down on the wall while I took photographs with my camera. Suddenly I was surrounded by a rather rowdy who I though were after my phone and in an attempt to pick it up quickly, I knocked it over the wall into the crashing waves below.

That has not been our only incident with water and phones. I was quietly reading the paper when there was a scream from the kitchen and there was my wife, standing by the open door of the washing machine, holding up her mobile which she had just retrieved from her trouser pocket after it had been through the full cycle. It was a very clean mobile but also very inert.

Where do you put your mobile when you are on the beach? Obvious answer, tuck it in your trunks. Wrong. After a while, you forget it is there, and then comes that moment when your friends shout, “Last one in buys the drinks” and another mobile ends up ruined.

I have not had much luck with those cases that fit on your trouser belt. I stumbled against the door, not through drink I should add, and the metal door handle knocked against the mobile securely fixed to my belt. That cost me a new screen. I used the phone for a month before I decided to have it repaired. I shouldn’t have bothered. A week after it was repaired I was out delivering some leaflets, went to make a call, put my hand to my belt and the mobile was gone. I retraced my footsteps and there was no sign of it. When I got home I had the network cease it, luckily for me the person who found it only used it once to call a taxi.

Going back to my old Nokia (before I buried it at sea), I can’t remember the name of the model, but it was the one with the little stick up aerial on it, I had it for about three years and it worked well for me, but I knew it was time to upgrade to a newer model when my car was broken into and they left my mobile behind on the seat! It was time to upgrade – thieves did not find my goods attractive.

Which reminds me of a friend in New York, who when they left their apartment for a holiday, put their valuables in an old cardboard box in the boot of an old VW Beetle in the alley behind their house. No-one touched it. My mother used to wrap up the silver in newspaper and put it in a cupboard under the stairs. It never got stolen but if a burglar did break in I hoped that he would appreciate the fact that my mother had wrapped everything up and put it in carrier bags for him to carry away!

I rang my grand daughter the other day only to find that her number was no longer working. When I asked her why, it turns out that a girl at school threw it on the ground – and that it is it – the girl’s mother won’t buy my grand a new one. I worked with someone who lent his mobile to a friend who bought it back in three pieces and apologised because he had fallen down, there was no suggestion about getting a new one!

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31/08/2007 by admin.

There was a time when the theft of Mobile Phones was on the increase. It was unsafe to walk down the high street in any town with your mobile on view as you might get mugged. Things have changed a bit I think because of the co-operation of the manufacturers and the networkd. It is not so easy now to register a stolen phone on a new network.  So is it still necessary to have your phone insured.

I think there are several reasons.

If it is stolen before you realise it has gone, then a number of expensive calls can be made.

Even if the chances of it being stolen are low, there is still the fact that if it is stolen, you may bave to pay - big time. If you are ona contract, then you probably paid well below the value of the phone to “buy” it - that’s because the network will recover the costs in the rental. But check your small print, if you stop paying or report the phone stolen, then you are liable to pay for the value of the phone

So insurance is still valuable.

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31/08/2007 by admin.

This is my first venture into the world of blogging.

Posted in Safe Phones, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »