There are some techie things I love because they just do their job so well, and some I just like for the sake of the technology itself, but I have one glaring and increasingly embarrassing blind spot with gadgets: the mobile phone.  And last week I found out just how big that blind spot is.

Its not that I am particularly hostile to the idea of mobiles, although the way they are used and relied on so much now does annoy me; when I see a couple together in a bar and both are talking away on their mobiles to someone else its more sorrow than anger that I feel.  If I am trying to get some kip on a train and someone in the next row is yelling inanities that’s different.

As for the devices themselves, I notice from adverts or articles what they are capable of and I am impressed on one level that so much functionality can be crammed into a small case, and I can appreciate that achievement, but they just leave me cold.  I don’t find myself wishing I had one like I do with digital SLRs or 1Tb network drives.

Last week Jayne’s contract with Vodafone was running out and she was eligible for a free upgrade on her handset so we went into their shop.  I was duly impressed by the fact that one phone there had sat-nav built into it and that another had a 5 megapixel camera and so on, but I was still happy with my old cast-off pay-as-you-go.

Jayne chose some flashy touchscreen thing made by Samsung and gave me her old handset.  Its a technological miracle alright, but one that I had never been interested enough in to find out how it worked.  I took it purely because it has a half-decent camera on it and its handy to have  such a thing on you.  It also has aa Sony Walkman built in.  I don’t really need that but loaded some Kraftwerk, Primus, Manu Chao and Rush onto it anyway.

The problem for me was that all the contacts on it were saved onto the phone as well as the SIM and when you make a call it defaults to the phone’s contacts.  Very annoying.  So I decided to copy my contacts from the SIM and managed to do it the other way round instead.  For some reason, copying contacts to the SIM doesn’t add them to what is already there, but overwrites them.  At a stroke I had wiped out all the phone numbers I had built up – many of them I had never written down anywhere.

Now, if the phone rings, I have no idea who is calling.  Its like being back in the 90s.  Worst of all, losing those accumulated numbers made me realise that perhaps I rely on the mobile just a little bit more than I thought I did.