The joys of ...

...  no, not Spring  nor sex but tele(non)communications.

Being a chump I lost my mobile phone.  Fortunately I was able to block it before anyone found and called all their relatives in far-off parts.  So I had to get a new one.  This turned out to be relatively easy as we are generally happy with the service and charges provided by Virgin (and as Frances was staying with Virgin wanted to be able to call her for free).  They also offered a nice 3G phone at no cost if I signed up for 2 years.

So I rang and spoke to a nice person who I suspect knew her way round a lamb korma (and chicken tikka marsala).  I am not saying she was in Mumbai (since they also have call centres in Chennai, Kolkata and elsewhere in the subContinent).  They also said they could send me out a SIM card that would let me keep my old number.  It appeared that would be sent 2 days after the handset and I would have to sign for both.  They were very definitie about that.

The handset arrived on Wednesday (but of course we didn't find that out until 5pm so couldn't pick the handset up unitl Thursday.  However I was really keen to have the phone operational over the weekend so On Friday rang the Post Office to see if the new SIM (which I would have to sign for) had arrived.  No records in the PO.  Drat, drat, drat!  Ring Virgin (one could almost hear the Tandoor heating up in the background) to get a tracking number to see where it was at: no, they don't have that but it was sent on Tuesday

Then our mail arrived.  With a Sim card.  No signature needed!!  Neeeaarrrggghhh!  There was a letter with it quoting a 21 character number that I had to check matched the one on my account.  But I couldn't find one on the account (and the one on the sim card was only 15 digits).  So back on the phone to Rogan Joshville and find that they recognised the sim card number (the 15 digit version) and that was linked to my old number.   No idea what the 21 character version does. 

Then wait half an hour and it works.  Now to learn how to use it: that will require some effort as I think the manual has come from Finnish to English via Hindi (and possibly Urdu en route).

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