This week, I discovered that getting a phone bill for nearly £400 can cause something of a shock. Especially when the bulk of it is for an upgrade fee for a (supposedly free) phone which, although capable of talking fairly nice photographs, has an entirely useless GPS feature which can narrow down your location only as far as the nearest city or metropolitan borough, and which is also a bit too large to actually put in my pocket and carry around. Which probably isn’t a good thing for a mobile phone.

Still, it’s been corrected now, and I have been promised that there’s absolutely no way whatsoever that my phone will be blocked because of my non-payment of this sum, which of course I believe. But, corporate bullshit being what it is, they couldn’t say the bill was cancelled due to error on their part, but instead told me that the money was going to be waived, not specifying it’s on the grounds that I don’t actually owe it to them at all. The benevolence!

Thinking about it, though, the amount of the bill wasn’t actually that high. One day, I dream of being one of those people who run up a £15,000 phone bill checking Facebook on their phone while in Yemen for a month, and having a photo printed in the paper of me holding up the bill and looking sad for all the readers to laugh at.