Dear Philippa,

 

Rosie and I went down to Quendon on Sunday to spend a couple of days with Helen and Rufus. On Monday morning Helen marched me down to the Vodaphone shop in Bishop’s Stortford to sort out my cell phone “so that we won’t keep worrying about it”. To be honest, I haven’t been worried about it but she obviously has so I meekly went along. High Street mobile phone shops are dreary places for people not interested in the minutiae of their product, a bit like betting shops I suppose, where the number of decisions and choices you have to deal with even on simple transactions, like an in-car charger, lead rapidly to neurological meltdown. And the waiting – it’s worse than a pox clinic on a Monday morning – while nerdy types converse at length with equally nerdy assistants in a language resembling FORTRAN, and not a chair in sight for those of riper years.

 

When we eventually got in front of an assistant my heart sank – his badge proclaimed: “I’m new!” Actually, he was OK, not too nerdy (but wait until he’s been there a few weeks), though he looked puzzled when I suggested they should go round the pharmacies in town and nick a few of those chairs they have that advertise haemorrhoid medication, Anusol I think it’s called. What we wanted, Helen decided, was to change my account from a twenty quid a month deal – a lot for receiving texts mostly from Vodaphone – to a pay-as-you-go arrangement under which I would drip-feed tiny amounts of money into the system with a handsome refund at the end of the year. Impossible. Not only that, the cheapest deal is £10 a month, no rebates on the use it or lose it principle, and you can only do it on-line. My least favourite phrase in the English language is “on-line applications only” (my favourite is “full English breakfast”). Anyway, New Boy said it would be dead easy.

 

It took an hour. To be precise, it took Helen an hour while I sat morosely by drinking Yellow Tail Shiraz and solving the easy bits of the Telegraph crossword. At least half of that time was spent on the telephone to an unusually competent help-line operator, but the deal was done. My only contribution, apart from opening a second bottle, was to confirm to the help-line chap that I was incapable of conducting my own affairs and did indeed want my daughter to do it for me. Since then I have had a flurry of text messages from Vodaphone confirming the order, giving me a secret number, telling me that my new phone (free) would be dispatched on Tuesday for delivery on Wednesday time-window to be confirmed, a correction to that, dispatch now Wednesday, followed finally by notification that dispatch would after all be Tuesday and delivery would be between 12.05 pm and 1.05pm. It arrived at 12.30, as promised, and not by a wood-elf. 

 

In a life littered with disappointments and broken promises this was quite a result. What I want to know is, why to they go to all this trouble to arrange for me to halve my spending, and how do they make money out of it? Even if my £120 a year is all profit? I fancy there’s a mystery in it.

 

Next week is my birthday and so intimate is my relationship with Vodaphone now that I confidently expect flowers to arrive. Or a bottle of Shiraz.

 

Best wishes,

 

Howard