When I was small I have memories of my grandma and my parents owning one of these phones, not that they had much choice of course since it wasn’t until the early 80s that other companies were allowed to make phones in the UK; before that it was the good old GPO’s job to rent one out to you. I took mine to bits to fix the dial, it kept sticking, and while taking it apart I took some photos which are attached to links throughout this post. Read on, this is more than a bunch of photos…
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Isn’t it awful being woken up by the phone ringing? It means you’ve got to go from being asleep to talking to another human in about two seconds. isn’t it even worse when you can’t find the damn phone and by the time you do they’ve hung up? You could have just stayed in bed asleep.

So I pick up the phone this morning after excavating it from the mess in my office and stare bleary-eyed at the display to read the caller ID. On it I see my own number… right, that’s odd. Let’s ring 1471 to see who called. The BT robot dutifully says

Telephone number 01xxx xxxxxx called today at 8 am. To return the call using BT, press 3

The number she reads out is my own phone number. The number of the phone I have in my hand. Somehow my own phone number has managed to ring itself.

I hang up in confusion and then decide to ring it, just to check I’m not in some strange universe. When I pick up the line again I hear the modified ringtone that says I have a waiting voicemail, so instead I go to check that. It turns out to be a voice text, which is what happens when people SMS landline phones. I press the required button to listen to it.

I stand there slightly confused as the slightly robotic BT voicemail lady appears to be coming onto me. She then finishes her slightly dodgy message by reading out the number of the person sending the text…

To save my sister the embarrassment, I won’t write the text message here but I now know she was drunk this morning at half four and couldn’t wait to get home to see her boyfriend. I also know that in her phone I must be listed just above her boyfriend in the phone book.

She’ll work this out when she wakes up and reads her Facebook updates

For those that’ve never received an SMS to their landline, it gets read out by the same BT robot that does the 1471 stuff, it then reads out the digits of the sending phone’s number rather than a name or anything.

Please stop ringing me during the day when I am at work. If you must, leave a message on my answering service! Every day for the past week you’ve rung and not left a message. I bet you’re phone spam, if so please go away as my number is registered on the TPS.

So if you think you need it, contact me. I’m on O2 now after taking my phone to a dodgy bloke in the market and handing over my phone and ten quid. I then had to endure the lengthy and boring welcome messages from O2 and receive the intense session of SMS spam they send out to configure the phone.

Unlocked phones are great, so is not being on a contract. I could have kept my old number but the thought of sitting on hold to Orange customer service was too much to bear.

I had some phone spam yesterday from some American company doing an opinion poll.

Once I worked out it responded to buttons on my phone I spent a gleeful five minutes prodding random buttons. Then, tiring of this I hung up… but the other end didn’t… for ten minutes until an operator came on to take my details so they could send me my winnning prize.

So I hung up on him instead, which seemed to clear the line.

Next time I may respond with “Autorisation code please… what? how did you get this number. Forget you ever called and never call back, this is an unlisted number”

I found a message on my mobile from a BT engineer saying my line was repaired and working. My Internet is back to its normal speed and the line quality seems to be normal again. I’ll see if callers complain about noise on the line when someone gets round to ringing me.

After checking the line was working I noticed I had a voicemail from Tuesday. It was from a local dentist wanting to know if I wanted to be a patient with them. Kind of handy since back on Tuesday I only noticed my line was faulty because I wanted to ring a dentist and join them. They’re NHS too so I think that means its cheaper.

So two things have been sorted in one, and I now have an appointment on the 22nd of October where they will no doubt prod my teeth with their metal spikes and decide half my fillings need replacing. Then again I do need a filling repairing so maybe that’ll distract them and I’ll get away with a filling I need and a scale and polish.

I don’t understand this one. My phoneline is dead, it “doesn’t work” in that if I pick up a handset and listen, there’s no dialtone. All I can hear is whatever the speaker picks up, which seems to indicate there’s current running down the line – although it’s not enough to power a normal plug in phone, that just sits there dead.

And yet, here I am, on the Internet through the same phone line. Admittedly I am connected at 2Mb/sec, and the line is mostly full of CRC errors, but it’s working and that makes me really confused. If I pick up my phone there’s a burst of static that dies away and then the line is quiet.

I now know there are no public payphones to the right of my house for at least a mile, the nearest one being to the left, about half a mile away. I knwo this because I set off on a walk to find one to ring BT to report the fault on my line (ring an 0800 number from a mobile? I think not). The phone I eventually found had a large sticker on it saying it was due for removal because not enough people use it.

That’s just great that is. OK so they get vandalised, tramps sleep in them/use them as toilets and they now cost 40p for a call, but when your own phoneline is broken, they’re a really handy way of calling BT for free. Dialling 0800 numbers from a mobile is not free, which is stupid.

The BT fault checker found a fault with my line and after a lot of checking, some more checking and a little bit of looking at the state of my line, told me it’d be fixed by Thursday. Isn’t that wonderful! I hope there’s something expensive wrong that keeps people busy for hours tonight, and that in fixing it they make my ADSL run faster afterwards.

It’s amazing just how cheaply we can talk to each other now. The other day I had a two hour Skype video call with someone, later that same person phoned me using a cheap call service and it cost him zero pence per minute; so after finding out the name of this company and signing up I can also now make free phone calls during the day.

On Friday I needed to demo some software I’d created, and talk about some design ideas for it. After five minutes of attempting to talk through the stuff over the phone we both gave up and used XP’s Remote Assistance to great effect. I was able to speak on the phone (using the previously mentioned free call service) while waving my mouse around his screen. It was really productive and worked extremely well.

Today I received a letter from BT telling me my cheap mobile discount plan was due to expire, and unless I phoned them they’d start charging me for it. So I phoned them to cancel the plan as I never really got any benefit from it. While on the phone BT told me that I now have free evening and weekend calls to all BT landlines.

So now I can ring people for free, which is how it should be.

I find this all quite interesting since I am ploughing my way through the Best of 2600 book I bought earlier. Right now I’m at the part where the American phone system is being split up, resulting in loads of little phone companies, confusing dialling systems, long distance providers and the general confusion that arises when something like this happens. There’s a lot of articles from the 80s in this chapter of the book where people attempt to guess what the future will be like, and whether it’ll be just as confusing. Well 20-odd years on and it’s not as confusing in general – we can at least direct-dial numbers for most places on the planet now, but choosing just who should carry your calls can be a complicated and time consuming process.

Fantastic… the day before I go on holiday to the Alps for a week my phone dies. And being one of my pieces of technology, it just has to die in the most irritating way possible. While attempting to send an SMS the screen just went blank, and now it won’t un-blank.

The rest of the phone works! It’s just received an SMS, and I can dial out and receive calls, but the screen remains totally black and non working. It can’t be a mechanical failure since I was using the phone when it happened, so all I can think is that the firmware has buggered itself in (it is a Windows Mobile device after all) and something has told the screen to turn off, but hasn’t told it to turn back on again.

So, before we go on holiday tomorrow, we’re off to the Orange shop to either get them to magic it back alive (highly improbable) or for me to buy a new phone. And it’s going to have to be a cheap phone since I wasn’t really intending on buying a phone again for a long time. I was going to buy a 1TB hard disk for my server, but now need to use that money for a sodding phone.

If I hadn’t been a mobile phone user for the past 10 years and this was my first experience with them, I’d probably not bother getting a replacement.

My phone has gone a bit nuts ever since I put the PAYG SIM in it. First it got stuck in a reboot loop until I managed to trick it into working by turning on ‘flight mode’, powering off the phone and putting the SIM in, then disabling flight mode. Then at the weekend it wouldn’t send text messages, instead simply queueing them up and greying out the ‘Send message’ option.

And yeah, the insurance didn’t carry over from when I cancelled my contract either.

Flight leaves tomorrow afternoon, so no updates until I return. When I do return, expect a torrent of back-dated entries (unless I find wifi over there).

My phone’s working now. But to do this I had to

1. Ring them back and tell them it wasn’t working
2. Ring back again because their computers weren’t working
3. Be transferred three times, eventually going back to the ever-helpful “concerns department” back in the UK
4. And then be put on hold because the previous call centre had my account locked
5. Then I had to ring the call centre again to link my debit card to my phone for topups
6. And now the only thing not working is the website stuff – it thinks I still have a contract, and happily informs me that my account is disabled. I did try ringing up about this, but failed to get my point across at all

My phone now has £10.01 in credit, I am on the Dolphin calling plan and have 300 free messages to abuse.