sumit/blogs

Titan, originally uploaded by Sumit.

Just awesome. It’s like the wonder years all over again.

I just remembered something.

Way back when I was a humble editorial assistant, one of my daily chores – one that I dreamt up, having always had a talent for creating work for myself – was to pull relevant stories off the Reuters terminal. Initially it was just noting down the relevant headlines to talk about in the next morning’s editorial meeting.

But after a bit I acquired an ancient printer from somewhere to hook up to the terminal, so I could print out all the relevant stories, copy them and pass them around. (Getting a printer was a bigger challenge than it sounds. Our IT budget was a wee bit smaller than that of a typical Reuters customer).

Shortly after that I bullied the terminal into printing to a text file. That meant I could take the stories to my computer on a floppy — which was equipped with a single-user email client (I think it was Eudora), hacked to somehow provide mailboxes for all of our staff in London, the US and Asia. (I can’t remember what I did now; but it can’t have been all that complicated). And so I could email everyone on the team with the day’s stories.

And a bit after that, I started to pull stories off the Reuters’ Oddly Enough feed (which seems to be less interesting today than it was then) and a bunch of others with entertainment value. I kept that up for more than two years, even after I’d been elevated to the giddy heights of staff writer and beyond — mainly because I was enjoying the fruits of the gift economy. I liked being “that guy in London who sends out the cool stories”.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I clearly had a strong urge to collate and distribute stories electronically almost a decade ago, which makes it slightly embarrassing that it took me this long to start a linklog. (The world’s first real linklogger recently celebrated his tenth anniversary). And clearly I wasn’t alone. All that changed was the technology.

Dear Orange,

We’ve had a pretty good few years. It took me a long time to get round to buying my first mobile phone – for so many years they were too big, too ugly, too constraining – but when I eventually took the plunge, there was only ever going to be one telco for me. Orange. That bold branding worked like a charm: warm, friendly, forward-looking. Not for me the lumbering Cellnet, illiterate Vodafone or grubbily populist One2One. The future was Orange.

And it did turn out to be a pretty bright future, at least as far as my wireless life was concerned. The various iterations of my Orange phone (one of the few personal accoutrements that I recall by its brand) have served me pretty well. I’ve been all over the world with my phones, and they’ve done the job everywhere from Calgary to Calcutta. Not bad.

But then I bought a T610 from you to discover, once I had opened my toy, that fully 21 of the slots available for photos were occupied by pre-installed pictures. Most were the kind of things that a large corporation imagines its customers would like to send to each other, and thus bore very little relation to anything I would actually like to see on my phone.

Anyway, it didn’t take long to purge most of them from my phone, but there were about a dozen that claimed to be unremovable. These included several that appeared to serve no function except to play a transitory animated gif when my phone went to sleep, an unremarkable picture of a daisy and a frankly feeble bitmap of a rose, presumably for those romantic occasions.

These residual bits of junk offended me. They were branding chaff on my otherwise sleek and efficient phone. And they were eating memory and wasting my time every time I used ‘my pictures’. (Yes, MY pictures). And then you started sending me junk txts, which you couldn’t explain and couldn’t stop coming. (Although at least you didn’t charge me for them – small mercies).

So I set out to take the Orange out of my Orange phone, but it wasn’t easy. Although I found some handy instructions on removing the junk from my phone, it took quite a few attempts to get it right. Naturally, there were no more useful instructions on your site. Technicalities kept getting in the way, and I was neither geeky enough nor brave enough to try any of the more brutal hacks that might have sorted things out in one stroke.

But now, I’ve finally got it right, and my 500KB of free memory has suddenly turned into more than 2MB. There’s still some cruft on there – some ringtones I don’t want and the Orange theme. They don’t take up much space, and they don’t get in the way, so I can live with them. When I find an easy way to remove them, they’re gone. The less trace of Orange on my phone, the better.

So I ask you, Orange Customer Services: Was it worth ticking off a formerly loyal customer just so that your expensively cultivated brand image will forever be associated in my mind with this?