The To Do List

So a while ago I got a call out of the blue from my cable provider informing me that because I hadn’t received any discounts recently (read: allowed myself to be ripped off instead of threatening to take my business elsewhere) they were going to offer me a sim card for my mobile phone that would give me a gazillion hours and trillion texts for ten pounds it would cost me nothing because they would knock it off my bill and if I changed my mind and sent it back to them I’d still get a ten pound discount on my account. This all sounded to good to be true so I of course said yes and two days later the sim card duly arrived and I discovered that things were a little more complicated than I’d first thought. To use the sim card I needed to get my mobile phone unlocked and so began a saga that saw me driving to various dodgy areas of Birmingham in search of mobile phone unlocking shops who could actually work their magic with my phone, handing my phone over to a complete stranger, being told it would take twenty minutes only to return half an hour later that they had some how broken it and that they didn’t have the software they needed to fix it in the shop and asking me if could I come back in the morning to pick it up as though I actually had a choice.

Anyway, long story short, I picked up the phone, it worked, took it home, shoved in the cable operator’s sim card, tried to get a signal, failed to do so, wandered all around the house looking for a signal, managed to get one bar in the loft if I held the phone out of the window, made a call to my wife who was in the kitchen told her the sim card was rubbish and that I would be sending it back, anyway I didn’t do it because I knew it would be more of a pain in the backside than it had been so far? And guess what? I was right.

For an opportunity to win £100 worth of Hodder books, enter the To-Do List challenge at www.hodder.co.uk/thetodolist.