Evening all. If you have hours to waste, read on. All round it's been a tad stressful today, what with one thing and another. No hugely major niggles but at the end of the day you begin to think will anything go right.
You may remember P and I helped our elderly housebound neighbour get online and I spent some considerable time teaching him to do his online shopping. Well after a decidedly dodgy start, I'm proud to say, after a few hiccups, he's now on top of his own Tesco online shopping with no input from me. He hasn't yet mastered Google, Internet browsing/shopping or emails but I've promised that when winter comes and I have more free time we will address these issues. Two or three days ago I visited and he proudly said he'd bought himself smartphone (by telephone from a catalogue) but that it was faulty as they had sent an American charger instead of UK, and he was sending it back. I queried this and he reluctantly allowed me to open his parcel. It turns out the charger was UK with extendable pins, so I showed it was real,y OK. So face was saved here. I'm not sure they'd have accepted it back anyway as he had massacred the box opening it up. First hurdle jumped. Next day a phone call: ' what's a SIM card?' P explained he would have one in his old mobile which may or may not fit the new one. Next hurdle jumped ...or so you might think. Another phone call 'how do I get the card out of my phone?' He didn't want help doing it so we advised finding the instructions from his old phone to find out how to get the card out. Nothing heard back so we assumed all was OK, until I visited today (offering courgettes, as you do). He asked where can he buy a card, Tesco only have playing cards or greetings cards not phone cards?. I explained a new card might mean a new number and offered to take his old fashioned phone and the new smart phone over to P to see what could be sorted out.
Here comes the crunch (literally). He had used a screwdriver to prise the back off the old one scratching and damaging it but the SIM was missing. Opening up the new smart phone, in the SIM slot was a mangled something stuck fast. It turns out his old SIM was too big so he cut it down to size with scissors and forced it into the slot! Then used the screwdriver again to try to get it out.Then wondered why it didn't work.
P is currently trying to remove the offending bits. My neighbour said for him not to bother and he would just send it back, he didn't seem to understand the damaged box and blocked SIM slot rendered it unmarketable. We'll get there in the end but neither we, nor he, have quite figured out why he wanted a smartphone in the first place, when he couldn't even work the old fashioned simple one.
Snag no.2 is that we are planning to go to the Isle of Wight for the day tomorrow, then find out there maybe roadworks blocking our way home. Thank goodness for satnav or I'd be completely lost. I'm only the driver not the navigator. I fear we might be taking a bit of a detour.
Then I got drenched
... twice. Ah well, tomorrow's another day.