"Hi Matthew, great news, your mobile plan is getting even better!"
Don't you love it when the excitement of getting a text is replaced with that sudden realisation that it's your service provider?
"From 15th June [what, no 'of'?] you'll get free EU roaming. You'll be able to take all your UK data, minutes and texts to use anywhere in the EU at no extra cost. Perfect if you want to post a selfie from the beach [oh how do you know me so well?] or find your way around with maps [oh, you actually do]..."
I don't like this trend. I'm not saying it's not useful - I'm always getting lost and a little help from good old Google Maps is usually very welcome.
What I am saying is that I don't like the idea of being connected to everything while I'm on holiday - which is exactly what my service provider seems to be suggesting.
It's not just the good people who collect my phone bill every month! My employer too, seems to have a 'dream' where his whole department are able to log in from the beach. I know this because an image depicting that precise utopia appeared in a recent slideshow.
Only it's not utopia is it? You get sand in your laptop, the sun blinds your view of the screen, it's impossible to concentrate and oh yes... you're on HOLIDAY.
Blurring the lines between work and play seems like a truly terrible idea to me, yet society is pushing us all down the holistic route where anyone can call you, email you, IM you, anywhere, any time.
Personally, I think there's something rather magnificent about being able to say that your phone wasn't able to connect to the local wireless network, or that you couldn't get enough signal from the coconut bar.
"I did try to Skype into that big meeting but VPN kept kicking me out," I imagine myself saying, looking woeful. Now, what goes in a pina colada again?
I haven't been abroad for a while, but when I did I switched my phone off. Like, properly off for the whole week. There were no loops I felt left out of and there was nothing I could do about it if there were. Though, admittedly I did get lost a few times in Sorrento.
So perhaps, what we need is a kind of flexible Internet:
Yes I'm in a backstreet in Marakech where it feels like I'm about to be abducted by Moroccan carpet-makers, and yes I'd quite like to find my way out of this.
No, I don't want to know what Tim had for dinner or how far he cycled in an attempt to work it off. And I definitely don't want to think about the minutes of a meeting that I missed where everyone decided to assign all the actions to me.
So turn all that bit off, as though it's all quietly in airplane mode, and just turn Maps and Wikipedia and Expedia and Notes and Blogger on.
Oh and maybe Teach Yourself Emergency Arabic.
That has to be possible, right, service providers?
While we're at it, could you get my phone to self-destruct if it's ever used to take a selfie on the beach?
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