New brooms

I'm not one for keeping with the Joneses, or with the Zeitgeists. I wait for things to break before I replace them, and mobile phones are no different. I had an old, "chunky" phone for years and years, but the sat nav on it finally stopped working. It was rubbish sat nav anyway, and I never used it as sat nav, but it was nice to have in an emergency. If I was on my own in the car somewhere new, and I couldn't find where I was going it was good as something to pull over and have a look at.

The other thing about old phones (and tech in general I guess) is that it is something that is socially acceptable to make fun out of people for. I guess you could even call it a minor form of bullying. Like when you get your hair cut a different way, people just can't stop themselves commenting when they see you - every time anyone saw my "untrendy" phone they had to mention it, as if I didn't know it was an old phone. It's something that gets fairly tedious, but I suppose people have to make themselves feel superior to other people wherever they can.

So I trotted off to the phone shop last week to ask if I could get an upgrade. The salesgirl took my phone and stared at it. It was probably older than she was. She tapped my details into the computer and asked rhetorically (I think) with some credulity, "How long have you had this?" She next brought up my "usage" and was similarly derisive that I was not in constant communication with the outside world.

Now that I have a new phone...like a new haircut people can't help themselves from commenting every time they see it. Some things I guess you just can't win.