La donna è mobile

"But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love that you had at first." Revelation 2:4

When I broke my collarbone last year, after the doctor had screwed it back together again, I spent six weeks pottering around waiting for the fracture to knit. I made a lot of jig saw puzzles, re-read all the Bond books and played a lot of Snake on my mobile telephone. As a consequence of this last form of distraction therapy, I effectively erased all the characters on the rubber pad of my phone; the Nokia 1100, if you're interested.

After I got better, I became somewhat embarrassed by this defaced pad. I would not leave my phone out on the table during meetings and I was very reluctant to let anyone borrow it. Once or twice I even pretended not to have it, when someone needed to make a call.

A few weeks ago, I made up my mind that I was going get a new one. I decided to bite the bullet, to make the move from pay-as-you-go and on to a contract. While I know there is no such thing as a permanent relationship in the world of mobile telephones, I felt that I was getting too old for the hurly burly of the top-up card. Time to go steady.

I went to the Carphone Warehouse opposite Liverpool Street Station in the City. I have to say, it was a bit of a shock. I wasn’t prepared for all the tariff deals, the offers and discounts and personal use permutations. Did I want free weekend calls or discounted international calls? Was I more concerned about network coverage or price? Was I a big texter? What were my pixel and MP3 requirements? Interestingly, there was no mention of Snake.

“My advice to you,” said the pretty saleswoman, “is spend a little more money and get more free speaking minutes. You’ll have a nice new phone and you’ll want to use it.” She showed me all the handsets. They all looked lovely. One particularly caught my eye. “Great battery life that one,” she said encouragingly and then added [hiss hiss], “if you chose it, we’ll offer you half price redemptions every three months for 11 months. You’ll want to upgrade anyway, then.”

What more could I want? Free time and redemption every three months. I filled in the direct debit forms and went off with my nice new phone. But maybe it’s harder to move on from one’s first handset than I had thought. When I got home, and put the phones side by side, the new one (the Samsung X820 Ultra, no less) looked, frankly, a bit sharp. Was it really ‘me’, I wondered? Was I being a little hasty?

It sat on my desk for a week. In the meantime, I made some comfort calls with my old phone. I did some recreational texting. I played a game of Snake, for old times sake. Something was nagging me. "Upgrade" after only a year? Apart from anything else, why would I want to go through the whole "did I want to flick or did I want to slide" routine again?

In the end I took it back within the two week 'cooling off' period. But now the pretty saleswoman was less helpful. “I’m afraid you need a valid reason if you want to cancel the contract,” she said. “Is it the wrong phone or the wrong contract? Also you need to be aware that cancelling the contract will effect your credit rating. They'll think you don't have the money.”

Should I say that I was returning the phone in defiance of the false consciousness generated by the consumer fetishism of late capitalism? Would this be considered a valid reason? Instead I said, “It’s just that I now realise, as I was about to dump it, how much I love my old phone and how much I have always loved it.” There was a long queue and she wasn't going to argue.