Generally I try to keep on-topic and only recount stories and anecdotes as they relate to stupid networks. But having a 14 month old toddler in the house causes a few funny things to happen, so here's three quasi-telephonic incidents to cheer up your working day.
One of my daughter's first intelligible English words was "hello". (I don't think "wilderwee" is in the dictionary.) She's a pretty friendly little imp, accosting passers-by and insisting on saying hello and byebye. She'll even chase them down the street at maximum waddle speed if they don't seem to have caught onto the game right away. Anyway, she picked up on the association of "hello" and answering the phone pretty quick. Almost the first time I handed her my cell phone she put it to her ear and announced "hello". (I can't quite reproduce her twisted vowels in writing, so stick in a few of your own to improve the effect.) Rather cute. Anyway, now any TV remote control, hairbrush, or even seeing a hand waving about is a cause for sticking your arm to your ear and warbling "hello." We start 'em young in the Geddes household, although just like feeding organic babyfood (MrsDr G's choice...), I insist she only makes free VoIP phone calls.
Last night the LED on my DSL modem stopped blinking and turned solid green. Good news, we've got broadband, and two days ahead of schedule. One sad little side-effect though. Dear daughter goes "la-la" when she hears music, and often bobs up and down in a baby dance. You can be walking down the steet with her on your sholders and she'll pick up on a house or car playing music and start singing. While we had dial-up Internet last week I had the sound enabled on my laptop, and she decided this was a big la-la, and grinned and danced every time. I guess we won't be seeing any more of that. When she's older I'm hoping to introduce her into he more melodious harmonics of optical fibre.
Finally, we've got a lot of brochures from the mobile networks and retailers around the house. But I don't think we're going to go with the O2 network: little madam tore the covers off their marketing bumpf and put it all straight into the bin. She wasn't too impressed with Carphone Warehouse as a retailer, either. Shredded to bits on the living room floor. Seems to like Orange, paged through it for ages. I can understand her reluctance to commit, though -- they don't make it easy to unlock their phones. And is the untouched T-Mobile brochure a sign of approval of absolute distaste?
More results from the infant-driven handset and network selection another time.
UPDATE: She seems to strongly favour OneTel for landline carrier-preselect. Who am I to argue?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:07 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/296