27 Dec 2016_1

There are times when you do things you wouldn’t normally do. It feels a little wrong, but you do it. On this occasion I rode the Boxing Day bike race with my mobile phone in my back pocket. Normally, I’d have left it in my bag in the pits, but this time I didn’t.

My phone was smashed and unusable. So today, I spent £80 on a replacement. Which I can’t use yet. My new contract phone is at least six months away.

Where was I going with this?

It’s just because things can just work. Was there any reason that a sim card in a phone needed to turn in to a micro sim? The answer is yes, of course. Technology needs to move on, and move on in small jumps. It’s a generational gap, where generations live side by side. And it’s only when things break down that problems arise.

In short, I needed to ask for a micro sim from my mobile provider. I’m not frustrated anymore. Not now that I’ve realised that we have to keep moving on – even if it is wasteful and annoying.

Now I’m thinking about what the next sim will be called. Micro micro sim sounds stupid, and nano sim just drives in to another name cul-de-sac. But smaller, sims will become. My best plan is to make sure nothing I have breaks, until it becomes utterly useless.

However, I must keep pushing on. Looking old fashioned makes people look out of date, and your knowledge can make you a laughing stock if you don’t know what’s going on. But there is a way out. You can become retro, but knowingly retro. That’s not using old stuff, but new old stuff, which probably is a bit safer, but not as good as the old version.

Sometimes, great technology happened two thousand years ago – I was watching a documentary about Rome, and everything it took the rest of the world hundreds to thousands of years to catch up with. We could have been doing great things now.

I’m drifting now. Just remember that things could be better, and there are many good reasons why they are probably not.