Cancelled Hospital, N8 Arrives, N8 Broken, Depression, Suicidal, Great Video, Camp, Sat Nav, Fog, Defeated, Homeward Bound, TWAT.

Phoned the Hospital and rearranged my appointment for the 17th of February next year. At 8:40, shortly after Deb had left to drop Hannah at school and go to work, there was a knock at the door and my new phone was delivered. Let joy be unconfined I’ve finally got a Nokia N8! I spent the first hour checking it out and playing with it before I decided I was ready to insert the sim card. I removed this from my N82 along with the removable memory card. I didn’t need to put a card in the new phone as it has 16 Gigs of internal storage but I wanted to transfer the contents of the card into its onboard memory. This would alleviate the necessity of re-downloading the podcasts and videos I had stored on it. THIS WAS WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG!!! You know when crashes are blamed on human error, because the pilot is so familiar with what he does that he thinks he’s done something but he hasn’t, well I experienced something similar. I picked up the memory card and inserted it into the SIM slot pushing it home to ensure it fit. One Hundredths of a second later I realised what I’d done, but even now I don’t know why I did such a stupid thing, but it was too late. The card was in the slot and there was absolutely nothing I could do that would remove it. I tried easing it out with a pin but only succeeded in damaging the SIM slot. My beautiful new phone had now effectively been turned into a Nokia iPod, f**k f**k F**K! I have never felt so stupid in my entire life and the adrenaline was pumping through my system as the repercussions of what I’d done came home to me! When Deb called to ask if the phone had arrived and I had to explain what I’d gone and done I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me especially as she couldn’t keep the amusement out of her voice. Whether or not it can be repaired; forever after she and the kids will now refer to the N8 as the “brick” that Daddy made. What made things even worse was that everything that still worked, of course, worked perfectly. The camera and video were super as you'll see from this First Film -



The phone acquired a GPS lock in seconds and, after I’d remembered the password to allow it access, so did the Wi-Fi. It worked just fine allowing me access to the internet.

Eventually Deb and the Kids came home and discovered, in detail, exactly what as massive screw up I’d made. Despite this, the Kids were completely captivated by what the N8 could still do and were fighting with each other to get their hands on it.

Nat had to leave for camp so I put the approximate location into the phone which would allow me to test out the free Nokia Maps software. Again this worked superbly and we obtained full off line voice guided navigation. Unfortunately it was very foggy when we left home and as we travelled toward Kirby Mallory this got worse and worse. We easily found the general location, after a hic-cup when I entered the road name and we discovered that the software had plotted our route to a street within Leicester with the same name. We eventually got to the right road but by this time visibility was appalling so despite repeatedly driving up and down the road and stopping to ask directions a number of times we were unable to locate the entrance to the camp site. Eventually we decided it was no longer safe to keep looking and returned home. When we got back I phoned one of the scout leaders and explained what had happened and agreed we’d drop Nat off there in the morning. Even in the daytime the entrance proved difficult to find and it was pure luck that Hannah spotted it as we, once more, drove passed it.

I can’t say I slept well that night; I tossed and turned dreaming of the complete disaster I’d created because of a moment’s inattention! I sincerely hope it’s a long time before I experience another day like this one…Twat!