I am not a lover of mobile phones, rarely send text messages and fail to understand the almost surgical attachment some people have to their phones.  Despite this, I own two pay-as-you-go phones and occasionally cause amusement by having one in each hand as I switch them off.  Two hands, two phones, what's the problem?  I have two because a long time ago when I ordered the first, online, the supplier sent me an email saying it was no longer available so I ordered another from a different supplier and on a different network.  When both arrived I decided to keep them, assigning one to 'work' and the other to 'personal'.  This actually works quite well: the 'work' number is on the church noticeboard and only family and friends have the other number.

Trouble is, the 'personal' phone has never been very good - it eats battery charge like it's going out of fashion and gets very poor reception even with a good signal.  It was time to swap it.  So, off to the O2 store where a very helpful young man called Ross helped me select a suitable replacement - half the price and twice the whizzy gadgets of the old one.  He managed to avoid patronising this middle-aged idiot (at least where phones are concerned) and I now have a shiny new phone that should do the job for a while, and by the magic of SIM, still my old number and all my contacts.  Whilst I was there he sold me a 'half price special offer' pay and go mobile broadband dongle - so I now have three ISPs (ostensibly, I think they are all owned by the same parent) one way and another, ah well.

As I drove home I was trying to deduce whether my risk assessor self or Jewish heredity self was more comforted by the degree of redundancy and diversity I now have in my phones and internet connections.  On the one hand I can pretty much always get connected, on the other there's nowhere to hide!  Yup, definitely a judaistic risk assessor.

And despite all the above I will offline and not answering my phones for a full week from Monday!