Berlin FAQ Blog

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http://www.thai-guide.info/blog/thai-language/thai-for-beginners-2.html

I made a very adult and grown-up purchase - no, I didn't go out and acquire a new vacuum cleaner - in fact I bought my first ever Händy. Actually, because I'm cheap, I bought a pre-paid SIM card for a more mature but perfectly serviceable model which has been gathering dust on a shelf (and because it's a Siemens handset I'm half hoping I'll be able to hock it on eBay in a few years time for its rarity value).

This is not to say I've been without mobile telephony for the last decade or so, but up until recently all my Händys have been employer-provided, which is not quite as cushy as it sounds, because the jobs involved being part-responsible for a harem of internet servers, all of which subscribe to the God Murphy, a central tenet of whose religion stipulates that critical systems will fail at the most inconvenient time possible, e.g. at any point between 6pm on Friday and 8am on Monday, and preferably during periods when the only available personnel are engaged in high-stress activities such as moving house or dealing with recently deceased cats.

(A career tip: Never, ever accept responsibility for somebody else's servers, especially when they employ incompetent young programmers who somehow repeatedly manage to render high-performance servers inoperable, often entailing out-of-hours trips to a high-security server farm in the industrial wastes of Neukölln to press the reset button and engage in a little light computer therapy. Believe me, if you ever work with computers it's important to talk to them and give them little pats every now and again otherwise they start getting neurotic and flipping bits, which indirectly leads to male pattern baldness, at least if you're male).

As a result of which I developed quite a neurotic relationship with the cellular beasts, and as I'm somewhat over the age of thirty that means I grew up in a dim and distant pre-Händy era and still remember how to practice such arcane arts as being able to meet up with people without the aid of a constant stream of "hello where are you now?" phone calls and SMSs and can survive remarkably well without the damn things. And to be honest, the fewer gadgets in my life requiring constant care, attention and battery charges, the better.

Alas, it now seems society is now so far developed that not having a mobile number marks you out as, at the very least, an eccentric, and sometimes even as a bit of a fibber because some denizens of our time are simply unable to believe that I do not have a portable phone in my pocket, even though I am pleased to see them. So for the sake of smooth social interaction I thought it best to acquire a set of digits which will cause - on the offchance someone calls me - a tingling, vibrating sensation in my trousers.

This post has been moved here:
http://www.thai-guide.info/blog/thai-language/thai-for-beginners.html.