Mobile phones, fats and backups

As with such things, life has been rather dull since the fire - relatively speaking. Fortunately, I had a wonderful thing happening to my mobile phone that brightened several of my days before Christmas.

It all started about half a year ago, when the menu button on my Nokia E60 stopped working. That's rather inconvenient, but I could still call people up and receive calls, so no big problem.

Then, one Saturday in December, the old team from the National Nurses' Dormitory in Copenhagen had our annual, traditional, Danish Christmas lunch in a place called Told & Snaps in Copenhagen. When the frist dish was brought in - pickled herrings, of course - my dear friend Ole and I decided to see if soft butter on the keys could bring the menu button back to life. So we, uhm, buttered the keyboard - and it worked! The menu button worked again!

Flushed with succes we decided to try and repair the problems I had with the microphone and loudspeaker in the E60. So we used fat (from a duck, I think) on the, eh, bottom of the phone. Didn't seem to have the desired effect. In fact, in the days that followed I had to shout louder and louder in order for people to hear me. It was getting silly - I had to be in the privacy of my car in order not to disturb the general population with my shouting.

But I could still send and receive SMS messages, so things were OK.

Then my wife Anette and I had dinner at restaurant Avanti and that's when Anette hit the oil lamp on the table so that the E60 became soaked in oil. The display looked like a lava lamp and the keys became very loooong and soooft to use.

During the night, while I was asleep, the E60 sadly expired.

That's when I discovered that my 800 contacts were residing inside the E60, not on the mini-SD-card. So I got a new phone from a friendly phone broker (an N-73, which seems to be a fine phone, by the way) but every call I received were wonderfully new and exciting since I didn't recognice any of the numbers.

Of course I didn't have any backup. I'm a man.

Then a miracle happened. Anette and some good Miracle folks managed to wake up the phone for a short while and unload my contacts. That was a good day.

So people have told me: This will teach you to remember to take a backup!

But look at it this way: I started carrying a mobile phone 25/8/370 back in 1991 and this was the first time I was in danger of losing everything. And I have never taken a backup.

Chances are it won't happen again anytime soon either, unless somebody steals it.

So I think I'll continue with my usual mobile phone backup strategy :-))).

Merry Christmas.

Mogens