Irritation

Blogging has been sparse this weekend, for which I apologise. I have had other fish to fry, namely my mobile phone. My initial delight with my not-so-new, all-singing-all-dancing phone has been put to the test this weekend, and I'm just about ready to chuck it out of the window...

First of all, my computer refused to recognise the phone when I attempted to synchronise the two. I put this down to the vagaries of ActiveSync, Windows and Microsoft Outlook having a hissy-fit because I preferred to use Calendarscope, HandySync and Mozilla Thunderbird. I finally managed to sort the problem out by Saturday night (or so I thought) and life carried on, though synchronising was still slightly "sticky."

And then, on Sunday, my phone packed up completely. I phoned O2, only to get through to a particularly gormless individual. He blamed a build-up of static, and suggested that I wipe the SIM card with my finger. When I said I'd already tried taking out the SIM card, he suggested that, umm, maybe I should try another phone... and then he said that he'd just spotted that there was a problem with the network, and they had an engineer on it right now, and if the phone didn't work after 24 hours, to call back...

...it seemed plausible enough. And then a friend phoned my home phone for a chat. From her O2 phone... and I noticed that my Calendar on my mobile was inaccessible... as was my list of contacts...

I rang O2 again... only Customer Services was now closed. It was at this point that I started to get twitchy. I began to realise exactly how much I had come to rely on the mobile as a way of recording everything important... I mean, it's such a handy little thing... I even use it instead of a notebook...

And so I explored the phone a little... and discovered the "re-set to factory settings" option. After dithering for all of five minutes (during which my lack of mobile phone connectivity caused serious withdrawal symptoms) I pressed the buttons. The good news was that the phone now worked...

...the bad news was that all the bits I had put on my phone previously had all disappeared... Like the contacts list. That was easy to put right - I had managed to save my contacts on my home PC. The calendar should have been easy to put right too. Unfortunately, Outlook tried to get too helpful (in an attempt to woo me away from Calendarscope, no doubt) and had copied my calendar when I wasn't looking. So when I synchronised with Calendarscope, every single appointment and all the feast days were duplicated... twice... on my PC as well as on the phone.

I then had to spend the rest of the evening going through my diary and deleting all the duplicate items. I managed to disable the calendar on Outlook, and finally, it's all sorted... well, at least until the next time my mobile decides to throw a hissy fit...