Something is missing, a simple answer is out there somewhere, it’s just got to be found. Last time it was 311, the magic number that reconfigured the Kindles and reconnected us back to the local etheric world. This time it’s a national mobile network that’s of the opinion that we shouldn’t be able to send an international text message. The Navigator has scoured the net and the instructional manual all to no avail and has decided to confront the beast, entering the den of an ‘expert’. Only we’re in a ‘two heads town’, where the staff of the ’nada Mercado’ follow you up and down the empty aisles, so it should be no surprise that the neighbouring shop owner is intrigued by this grey headed gringo, and comes around to find out her age. Slightly disconcerting as she runs the local ‘funeria’ and has a nice selection of coffins arranged around the wall of her shop. I hope that she’s a little premature with her implied assumption. As for the expert, she assumes that International and España are synonymous, that The Philippines is a port beyond experience. The problem didn’t require my favoured solution: The Threat: A composed but failed posting of a ‘techno rant’. The answer is as predicted: simple, and I suspect most of you have already solved it; drop the international access code and substitute the ’+’ icon….voila, connectivity. It’s the difference between Bakelite and Blackberry, between those of us who were raised with an human telephonist and in the ‘Push Button B Now’ world. Where an overseas call necessitated re-mortgaging, was short lived and high speed. Now it’s a ’mobi-phone’ instant globe, of monthly contracts and a billion minutes of free texts. Yet there is no such thing as a ‘free dinner’, so the Navigator donates for the ‘expert’s’ time if not the expertise, and declines a view of a distant future through the neighbour’s window.
The pity is for today: we’ll be out of range tomorrow, with a paid up ‘carga’ of pesos on account, that will be automatically cancelled at the end of the month. Time for another rant; a gripe on the evils of money grabbing, beggarly serving telephonic companies.
Hold on, don’t you remember the General Post Office, the coin in the slot, ‘Push button A’, the dead clonk of a failed connection, your lost, your last, thru'penny bit, punching and cussing an unresponsive coin return. Hold the rant.
