Took a stroll around Manchester this morning, and realised my mobile phone was almost completely out of power. It is a Vodaphone phone and so you can take it to any Vodaphone shop and they have to power it up for you. They hate doing this, wasting all their power for free, but they have to do it – so in your face Vodaphone. I’ve done this a few times now when I’ve been caught short without a charger (I mean caught short in terms of battery power, not as in a desperate need for the toilet, Vodaphone don’t let you do that in their shops – trust me, they go mad) and it always gives me a rather pathetic sense of satisfaction to be getting something for nothing, even if it is just a relatively minute amount of electricity. I wonder if there are any people in the world so tight that they purposefully take their phone back to the store they got it from to charge it up, rather than waste their own electricity at home? I bet there are.
It’s a shame it doesn’t work with cars. “Hello, I bought this car from your showroom two days ago, but it seems to be a bit low of fuel now. Could you fill it up for me please?�
Anyway, with the phone getting a delicious lunch of electricity in the Vodaphone shop, I decided to get a bite to eat myself, although being a human I needed food, not electricity, and so I couldn’t eat in the Vodaphone shop but had to find somewhere else. In the future, when humans run on electricity, I think Vodaphone will have to be very wary of people coming into their shops for a free snack under the pretence to wanting their futuristic phone charged. They want to watch that.
I like having a proper look around Manchester every once in a while to see what’s new. Like Liverpool, and for that matter Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, it’s growing at an astonishing rate and it’s all commendable and impressive. The Arndale Centre, once the stereotypical 1960’s shopping centre hell pit from a designers darkest nightmare, has been reopened and the change is remarkable. I looked around there, then The Printworks. It was in here that I made a strange decision on where to have by non-electricity based lunch. I hate chains, but I chose to eat in a place called Nandos. I’ve seen these around, and they look rubbish, but today a strange sickness came over me and I suddenly thought that making my first visit to a Nandos restaurant was an excellent idea.
They just serve chicken here, really. You order at the counter, like you would in a fast food place, and pay, then go and sit at your table having collected your cutlery and your plate and any sauce you want. You do everything except cook it really. It made me consider carefully if I should leave a tip? You would be leaving a tip for the waiter bothering to walk from the kitchen to your table with the food. In the event I left a very small tip. The food was unremarkable. I am like the new Michael Winner.
Returning to the Vodaphone shop to pick up my gluttonous phone, now fat on delicious electricity, the girl disappeared into the charging cupboard / restaurant and came out without it.
“When did you bring it in?�
“About an hour ago.�
She went back in and had a rummage around but again came out phone-less. I described the girl who’d taken my phone and was told she was on her lunch break. Very much like my phone had been. It was probably my phone that gave her the idea.
“Don’t worry,� said another assistant, smiling awkwardly “I’m sure we haven’t lost it.�
It was a strangely unresassuring thing to say to a customer, suggesting that loosing a phone is well within their capabilities, but it probably hadn’t happened on this occasion. Anyway I hung about for a while whilst various people scurried around looking in various offices and eventually someone came out with it. I was relieved that my phone hadn’t been lost, but bizarrely, a tiny part of me – about 0.1% - was annoyed that my phone had been retrieved and I didn’t have a better event to write about in Pathetic Lot.
Got a train back to Liverpool and rung Paula, my lovely agent, to tell her about Isma, the comic I saw last night. She is going to phone her. Be in no doubt, when you see Isma on TV in a couple of years from now, there is only one person who can be held responsible for helping her get there…..
Yes, herself.
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