Failure to Connect

After six weeks, five technical support dudes, three sim cards and two handsets, mobile carrier 3 has finally achieved what I was beginning to consider the impossible: connecting my iPhone for wireless internet to the 3 network. Oh, yes, I now have an iPhone so my blog header is marginally more appropriate.

Worrying statistics aside, I do not consider this situation to be entirely 3’s fault. Obviously as my mobile provider they have a duty of care to ensure that the conditions of my contract are fulfilled – even if that contract leaves 3’s own store-front employees speechlessly wondering how their company actually makes any money. But in all fairness, having me as a customer involves a swathe of inherent risks that I am sure even their most diligent product testing engineers could not anticipate.

Having accidentally drowned my Sony Ericsson handset (and iPod, and camera, and dongle, and three USB sticks) while on a country jaunt to Chatsworth House in search of both horses and my own private Mr Darcy (fail), I rang 3 from the Carphone Warehouse to cancel my existing contract, so that I could change onto iPhone with O2. As I made the call, my ears were ringing with warnings from the Carphone dudes that 3 might try to seduce me to stay, but that they would be unable to provide a better deal for iPhone than O2. This is primarily because 3 is not an authorised iPhone dealer, and so the handset itself would be a European import (and therefore of apparently of inferior quality, seemed to be the implication – whatever).

Obligingly, the 3 operator did indeed try to retain my custom, and I was treated to an extraordinary series of expressions ranging from suspicion through confusion to utter disbelief from the Carphone boys as I repeated the deal out loud for them to hear. For 3, in its wisdom/desperation, has given me a 16GB iPhone 3GS for free, with 1000 texts, some stupid number of minutes and unlimited internet – for £30/month. The entirety of my knowledge about phones and contracts would barely fill a thimble, but even without the silent mime show from the Carphone crew, I could tell this was a good deal. Naturally, I said yes.

The shiny 3GS arrived two days later, heralding a week of ringing people in preference to the fifteen-odd minutes it took my undexterous fingers to write text legitimate, punctuated text messages on the touch screen. This first week is also the time in which all new iPhone converts are bombarded by advice on which applications they simply cannot live without (one rule: no games. I am already the procrastination queen, without Angry Birds and Doodle Jump ensuring that I never write another word, ever), discover that the western world is literally split into pro and anti-Apple camps (even though the latter invariable have iTunes and an iPod) and that despite being one of the most advanced phones on the planet, the iPhone is inexplicably incapable of functions available on the most basic handset, such as emoticons and accepting any standard song format as your personalised ring tone. This was also the time I discovered that the standard Mac software package iLife, which included Garage Band, the program I needed to convert Jigga Jigga into a ringtone, had mysteriously disappeared from my laptop.

And of course it was also the time I discovered that my phone could not connect to the 3 wireless network.  I wasn’t too worried – I got around to ringing 3 a week after that in what was intended to be a brief diversion from the traumas of answering viewer feedback for the broadcaster I sometimes work for. With a channels portfolio that’s viewers include history pendantics, lovers of celebrity trash and people with a disturbing enthusiasm for murder and mayhem, three hours of correspondence a week can sometimes be three hours too many.  After 20 minutes on the line to an Indian 3 call centre though, the man writing to me sans punctuation requesting morbid details about the childhood trauma apparently responsible for John Dillinger’s later murderous activities seemed not only intelligible but quite rational in contrast to the technical operator.

This was the start of six weeks of phone calls to 3 Assist, visits to and afternoon naps in the back of my local 3 store and a series of phone and sim card exchanges which was finally proved a complete waste of time. The reason the 3’s finest were so confused was that my sim cards would operate flawlessly in other phones; other sim cards would operate flawlessly in mine; but together, whichever handset/sim combination I was currently using, there was no joy. 3 was stumped. Individually, both handset and sim worked. There was nothing more to replace.

Which clearly meant that the only consistent factor in this comedy of errors was yours truly. It had to me be. There was no other explanation. Now it’s well known that exercise studio microphones routinely mysteriously break down in my presence, that I can delete the whole of Microsoft office from a computer simply by turning it on and that I have no power whatsoever over remote controls, but this seemed a little unfair. I felt victimised by my own phone, which had become the ultimate evidence of my technological ineptitude. I consoled myself with the certainty that, when one day a supercomputer is about to destroy the whole world, I will become a superhero by causing it to crash spectacularly when afflicted by my gentle caress, but in the here and now, all I wanted was to be able to get Google Maps to the rescue the next I was lost somewhere (ie the basement of my own house).

And then a miracle happened. My fifth 3 support technician put me through all the usual boring and useless hoops I’d been dancing through the last month (Madam, please turn the phone on and off. Now madam, please remove the sim card. Thank you madam. Now I will test check the signal strength in your location. Right madam, now please reset your handset’s settings. Thank you madam. Now please perform a full reset via iTunes. I will call you back in 20 minutes. Thank you for your patience, Madam…) and then went away to ‘consult with another team’, which seemed to me to now be shorthand for ‘I’m done, I’m never going to call you again and god help me if I answer next time you call’. And then…the internet started to work on my iPhone. All the time. Anywhere. Once, curiously, underground.

They never did bother to call me and tell me what magic they had performed, and I daren’t call them back since half the staff will probably duck and run at my name and will never, as long as they live, forget my impassioned introductory statement: ‘Now look, I’d just like to stress that I’m not angry at you, but this situation has me as [bleep] as a [bleep] with a pointy stick rammed up my [bleep].’ I can only assume they developed some fancy piece of software that circumvents the Adele Field, in which case I’d rather like to get my hands on it for the next time the world does not need saving, but I need to be able to use a remote to turn on a television.

Tags: iPhone, The Adele Field