Sorry about the picture.
Communication has always been one of my things. Where ever I am in the world I need to be in touch. When I had my first house I had two phones in every room, both separate lines and in the bathroom four. Two by the bath and two by the loo, so I would not miss a call.
Then there were the mobile phones, when they first became available I got my first one, it cost £1850.00 they were car phones then, they had not become mobile. Once they did however, I had to be the first to have one and was the size of a reasonable sized family house. It was a daft price and that was just to buy the phone, the calls were another story. I never will forget my phone bills they were the equivalent to the debt of some third world countries. And of course as technology moved on so fast I was buying a new phone every two months trying to keep up with the shrinking size of handset and the increased performance. I am not nearly as bad now, but still need to have comms.
Recently, Zain (a major airtime company in Zambia) who I happen to be with for my airtime, decided to do something to their transmitters that rendered them as useless as a wet tissue when you have a runny cold. My phone signal went from a strong six bars down to a sporadic two, but only when it was stood up on its end, in the window, on the transmitter side of the house. I tolerated this very ungraciously, for two days then threw my toys out the pram, dashed out and bought an MTN sim card, whilst at MTN head office I noticed that they had a very cheap phone on sale, and it was cheap ZWK60,000. (which is £7.66) I thought at that price you can’t go wrong, it’s also endorsed by the airtime company having their logo blazoned all over it. I’ll give it a go I thought, then I at least can have one phone on each network, so hopefully I should get signal. So I bought one.
When I got home I opened up the box and threw away the packaging, (you know the one with all the writing on that says instructions.) and proceeded to assemble the phone, first I was staggered by the lightness of the phone, then by the fact that it did not have a separate battery, but this was in fact an integral part of the unit, and the only way to get it out was either with an angle grinder or an axe. This was not a problem as the phone had a charging port. Anyway I inserted my new sim card and put the phone on charge.
Within two hours the phone was charged and I went to make my first call. Much to my immense surprise it actually worked and I got through to the destination I required, the sound was ok, all be it a little wobbly and quiet, but it worked, and those problems can often be put down to atmospherics. So I was suitably chuffed, ended the call and went on to try and programme the phone with all my numbers and settings. I have probably programmed more phones than I have had cold breakfasts. But I did actually have to go and dig the instructions out the bin, to check that the phones capabilities were as it initially seemed. I know without fear of contradiction that my first Motorola I bought twenty years ago had many more features than this phone. As a direct result, the settings that had been programmed into this phone at birth were somebody’s or some working groups decision. All I can say is I would like to meet the fellow or fellows and find out just what it was he was smoking at the time.
I have now lived with this phone for fifteen days, six and a half hours and it’s driving me nuts.
It has a ringtone that could wake the dogs of hell, not only because it is so ridiculously loud it has broken all the windows in the office, but also because it has the single most irritating excuse for shitty noise that you can possibly imagine. It does not even come close to constituting a tune and barely comes under the description of sound. Best of all though, because it is the poverty model of cheapest phones in the market place today, it has no bloody volume control. Can you believe that any phone would come without a volume control, I use my volume control on my other phone about five times a day, depending on whether I am in the office, out in the fields or in a meeting. It only has one tune, it does not have a conference mode, in fact the only mode it does have is embarrassing, you cannot even turn the irritating sounds off. The tune is embedded so deep in its silicon heart it cannot change. As if that was not bad enough, it makes more than one sound. Whenever you touch any of the keys it sounds like a cat being stamped on, and at similar volume too. Then another area they have scrimped on is the earpiece speaker. It has got all the opposite traits to the ringtone speaker, it is ridiculously quiet, and has a range of sounds that could put dear mother nature herself, to shame. (It wasn’t atmospherics when I first tried it.) The downside being they don't resemble any of the sounds that were initially conveyed to the mouthpiece of the corresponding apparatus at the other end of the line.
And the final thing that gets me, that is no fault of the phone, is that two out of three people in Zambia have bought these phones because they are so cheap. So every time someone in Zambia receives a call two thirds of the population take their annoying yellow phones out of their pocket to shut the bloody things up, before anyone notices. But of course no one will notice, as everyone else is doing the same themselves.
I has reached the stage where If I don’t strangle this phone someone else in the office will.
Yes it was cheap and yes it does serve a purpose for the masses. But to me it is the most annoying thing since the crazy frog.
Denzil Bark.
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