Were you affected by the O2 network outage?

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were the Ruskies involved in this outage?

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Apple’s latest iPhones are dual SIM – one eSIM (for which EE is so far the only UK supported network) and one physical SIM slot. I currently use Three (paying 1p/2p/3p for data, SMS and calls). Once Three supports eSIMs and Apple release the next iPhones (both of which should happen by September 2019), I plan to use Three with the eSIM and O2 in the physical SIM slot to ensure maximum coverage in the UK, and given that O2 has reduced its charges to the same as Three. When abroad, I shall use local SIM cards in the physical SIM slot.

There are several phones with dual SIM slots available which presumably could solve some problems. It is very useful if you often travel out of the UK to another country.

Cubot is one provider.

Patrick – yes, it’s true that there are plenty of dual SIM phones on the market, but if one has reasons for staying with iPhones (not least the difficulty in transferring years of one’s data and purchased apps between iOS and Android), then Apple’s introduction of dual-SIM iPhones in September was a significant development.

And not before time!

In my day there was a season’s fixture list showing all the games lined up and a list of the away grounds. Games always started at the same times and it was the players’ responsibility to turn up at the appointed place in time to get ready for the kick-off. There was never any deviation throughout the season from the listed fixtures nor from the K-O times.

If anything, modern communication systems have made it far too easy to rearrange things.

Not often, George.

I am writing about my school days rather than as an adult player. If the prevailing bad weather conditions were set in for the weekend [as in 1963 for weeks on end] the school would cancel the fixture and you would find out on the Friday prior. Otherwise, you got to the ground if you could and if the match was called off because of frost or snow then you did PE in the changing room. In those days [late-1950’s to mid-1960’s in my case] not everyone had a phone at home so there was no question of ringing round. There was no social media or e-mail system to communicate alterations so everything had to follow the fixture list. I don’t believe any matches were rescheduled and there must have been some agreed mechanism for allocating points to abandoned fixtures to normalise the league tables.

Another difference is that most families did not have a car so we mostly travelled on bikes or public transport and some of the away fixtures were several miles away. Our home fixtures were about eight miles away from the school since our sports ground was in the leafy suburbs. Parents were not expected to attend so no touch-line nonsense. Different times, different world.

I think groundkeepers are more precious these days and declare pitches unfit for play to save them having to patch them up. If it rained we got wet and the goal area got churned up [heavy leather boots with long studs in those days as well].

And sodden, heavy, mud-encrusted leather balls = brain damage for those forced to head those lumps of lead.

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…news just in is that I have been offered compensation by giffgaff 🙂

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Are you sure he was joking?

Perhaps he was, but it is a fact of life that so many people nowadays are so used to getting all their information and updates from their hand-held device that they have no fall-back position if it does not function. Some people cannot put it down and are checking every minute whether they have missed something. If they are waiting or travelling or in some other passive state they spend their time flicking through messages and pictures that they have seen before. It is no exaggeration to say that a functioning phone is an integral part of their being and that their relationship with it is very up front and personal. The real or imaginary connection that it gives is the most valued thing in their life and they are desperate without it. This is a serious state of affairs, not to be mocked really, and does have implications for the way society develops. There probably is a withdrawal symptom arising from unexpected lack of access. I expect psychiatrists are already onto it.

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Thank you Duncan – and looking at the fees chargeable by psychiatrists in the USA [in your third link] it might have been a more lucrative profession. However, it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to spot the obvious, and it’s typical of America to get hold of a problem, turn it into an anxiety, label it as a syndrome, and then set up an expensive system for relieving it.

Unlike with alcohol, narcotics or gambling addiction, I don’t think ‘cell phone addiction’ should give rise to such harmful medical or psychological consequences, and the social consequences of mobile phone use and withdrawal, albeit potentially serious, are not on the same scale as with drink and drugs that quickly wreck other lives as well as those of the addicts. I expect the problem is more acute among those who already have some pre-disposition to irrational or compulsive behaviour for which the smartphone provides a new channel.

I remember when every serious networker and social integrator had to have a Filofax personal organiser and if they lost or mislaid it they would go into a dumb funk until they found it again or replaced it. It was the loss of their world, and the outage of a mobile phone network clearly has similar consequences. Despite the digital alternatives, Filofax is still a popular medium for rapid access to stored data that you can look at while making a phone call. Sometimes the free, passive, at-a-glance, non-advertising, and unhackable [generally] presentation of information beats the computer however small or large. What it lacks in interactivity it makes up for in accessibility.

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Unfortunately there was a problem with the link, Duncan.

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