Well That Was Jarring.

Since I've been about 16 my father (and actually initially my mother) has been providing me with a cellphone contract and every year the fixed cost part of the contract has been rolled over as a birthday gift. Since about 2009 I've been thinking I should take this contract over if for no other reason then the fact my father really hasn't come to terms with the concept of mobile Internet. The problem is that ever since 2009 I've been really busy around the time that the contract has come up for renewal mainly dealing with my father's chronic mismanagement of my grandmother's affairs so the contract kept getting rolled over.

Now inspite of the fact I've just come off the back of the busiest and most intense three weeks of my year my father decided this had to be done today. That gave me roughly 18 hours to learn everything there is to know about cellphone tariffs, network coverage and mobile device technology. This would have been achievable expect for the fact that yesterday afternoon I asked my father the very simple question of what is the existing contract was. He replied that he simply didn't have any idea so has apparently just been giving money to a cellphone provider over the years with no understanding of why.

This morning father did some research and managed to dig out some completely irrelevant information. So from the moment I woke up he has been bombarding me with this new information and a barrage of stupid questions as if I would be able to process any of it before he dragged me into a store and forced me to make a decision. Somehow I managed to turn this into a limited success by signing up for an affordable 12 month SIM only contract and a picking up a cheap second hand device to run it in until I'm able to sort out something more permanent.

The whole purpose of me taking over the contract was that I would be able to keep the same number. However since we've got back - and while I thought he was checking his emails - my father has been engaged in some marathon 2 hour webchat with the cellphone provider in which he managed to cancel the existing contract and get my number transferred over to a new pay as you go contract. Fortunately I was able to intervene at the last moment to cancel all that and will try again tomorrow by which point my father will hopefully have gained even the slightest hint of a clue about what he is trying to do.

So I have most certainly not spent today sitting around doing nothing. However it still feels a lot like my life has been wasted.


Incidentally while we were in town getting all this sorted we noticed that the new pedestrian walkway at East Croydon station had its grand opening today. All also having its grand opening today was the Green Climate Fund (GCF) which is headquartered in Korea. Coming on one of the anniversaries of my grandmother's death I can't help but worry that this is only going to make the UK more opposed to taking action on global warming.


18:20 on 4/12/13.