Mobile Connect

Oh, the joy of technology! Not.
After continually having to find The Cloud places, and then pay seven pounds for every three hours we use (three hours gets used very quickly), and then pay for drinks every time we want to use the pub or café’s wireless, the money’s starting to mount up. Plus the sheer nuisance of trailing around finding The Cloud places.
In the end we decided to go for it and buy a mobile connect, something we’d talked about in NZ before we left, but had decided wasn’t worth the cost. With the UK Vodafone system we can get one free - that’s the upside. The downside is you’re committed to a year’s payments of twenty-five pounds a month (can’t find the symbol for the pound), and have to pay one hundred pounds up front (which is refunded after six months). Because we’re leaving in December we have to decide how we can use up the months we won’t be here for. No doubt there’ll be a relative who could make us of it!
Anyway, that was all okay. We brought the mc home and bunged it in the computer. It installed itself and everything seemed hunky-dorey, until I discovered that the internet speed was about the level of dial-up. Turns out that this particular area isn’t one of the high level spots for Vodafone’s mcs. I thought that the cellphone network supplied the mcs but it doesn’t; it’s a different system, which seems rather daft.
That wasn’t the worst: today, when we tried to use the mc, nothing would happen. Vodafone might as well have not existed as far as our little machine was concerned. Great distress amongst the Crowls, particularly since we’d had to drive into Norwich to get the mc yesterday, and it looked as though we might be up for another trip today. It’s about half an hour to Norwich - but then another number of long minutes before you can get through all the traffic.
In the end after trying the mc all over the place, and not getting any results, we went back to Norwich. While Celia parked the car, I went into the Vodafone shop and discussed the issue with a young guy called Adam (I think!) He was very helpful, and in the end was going to swap our mc for another - until he discovered they’d sold out of them. So we finished up having to go to the other Vodafone shop (this isn’t an ad for them by the way) in Castlemall. They were even more helpful, and spent a good half hour sorting out the problem. It appears it may have been a faulty mc, though I don’t think anyone was quite clear at the end. Anyway, we have a new one, and it’s working. PTL!