Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 March 2017

Since his ex gave him her old phone, there’s no talk with the builder boyfriend—it’s just poke, poke, poke...

Someone has given the builder boyfriend an iPhone and things will never be the same. Until now, he has always had a ‘rubbish’ phone and I have always been able to get hold of him. Even though I have a blasted iPhone myself, at least one of us used to have a communications device that made and received calls.

His ‘rubbish’ phone was some kind of ancient Nokia or first-generation Samsung — you know, the kind with no access to the internet. It worked.

When I had a BlackBerry, we had as near perfect communication as any couple could wish for. He would call me, I would answer, or vice versa. Remember that?

Then I got an iPhone, very much under duress, because the BlackBerry corporation, in its infinite wisdom, refused to keep making the phones everyone loved.

From that moment, the communication worked only one way, which is to say, I could phone him and he would answer.

This is pretty much how the BB lives his life now: poke, poke, poke…

He couldn’t phone me because my iPhone, coupled with the evil network EE (which stands for End of Everything), never has functioning capacity allowing it to receive a call. As regards texts, sometimes they go, sometimes they don’t. It makes no odds if the phone says it has a signal. Even if it has full 4G, the text is just as likely to arrive three days later than to arrive in a few seconds, which, I believe, was the original idea.

Dear EE/Apple Inc., If you think this is unfair please get in touch and I will surrender my phone to you for examination. But I warn you, this phone is so screwed up that sometimes when I use it to send a text the number that comes up the other end isn’t even my number.

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