So coming back to my smartest Smartphone…after my tryst with the Menu button, I decided not to take chances. Since I was within the warranty period, I took my phone to the nearest Nokia Care Centre, which was not so near after all. After travelling for around 45 plus minutes and gifting my back with a nice ache, thanks to the potholed road, I reached the Care Centre.

I saw a sea of humanity just for phone repairs. Nokia must be doing something right, because in spite of the large number of people flocking the Care Centre, they are the leading phone company in India. So I got a token number just like a bank and waited for my turn. A 20-minute wait got me to this table where they checked if they could find some excuse to avoid repairing the phone. This made a lot of sense from the company point of view…to weed out at early stages itself…clear the junk from the deserving. This act also boosts you ego since you feel like the ‘chosen few’ especially when your phone passes the preliminary test. It’s a nice technique I must admit, since this feeling of being the ‘Chosen One’ makes the phone company more endearing and you tend to forget that you are here because this same company gave you a phone that was faulty. It’s amazing how the mind works!

So they took the phone, gave me a receipt and sent me off to collect it later. I was hoping that they give me some replacement phone but they politely refused such an arrangement…what was I thinking!!! So when I got my phone back in a week’s time, she had got smarter.

She decided to lay low and keep under the radar, since she figured out that I had the benefit of the warranty. So she was a patient being till a week after the Warranty expired. The smartass decides to start acting up again. This time she not only shuts off the Menu button (yet again), but she feels that the Bluetooth needs some rest too. So there you have it, my beautiful and smart phone makes sure that I can’t go to the Bluetooth in the first place and even if she does allow me to use the button, shuts off the Bluetooth to be doubly sure to harass me. So there I am, with a Cameraphone which can take snaps but does not allow me to go to the gallery to see it. If I do go in a round-about way, the phone makes sure that my memory is so loaded (since I can’t transfer anything out of my phone to make space) that the memory starts to bear the heat.

Thanks to the numerous incoming messages and the already full gallery of photos, I stopped taking snaps and my job was reduced to that of an inconspicuous clerk in a government office. Every new message coming is was like that of a new file which I had to move fast. The only difference was the lack of red tape here or opportunity to earn some underhand money. I had to keep deleting the messages to make room for more of it lest the phone slows down incredibly…a task in vain. No matter how many messages I deleted, the phone used to act as if she was perennially lost in thought.

If I pressed any button to go to inbox or contacts and on those lucky days to play the snake game, my darling phone will decide to procrastinate over the act. She will take her own time that by the time you do get access; you forget what you wanted to do in the first place. But the phone never used to let me lose hope. So when I used to try to open the photo gallery, she will show me a task bar which kept moving and display “Opening” continuously. This way I am still hoping that it will open soon enough and not bother her till she has made up her mind about the request…a real royal phone I say… to be continued…