Tag: Twitter

Nomophobia!

I learnt a new word last week. Nomophobia.

“Nomophobia is the irrational fear of being without your mobile phone or being unable to use your phone for some reason, such as the absence of a signal or running out of minutes or battery power. A phobia is by definition an irrational fear.”

Due to a technical problem with my thumbprint not amenable to be read for identification purposes for some applications, I had transferred my mobile phone number to my son as a temporary measure. Not needing to use that application anymore, I was getting quite frustrated with my name not being associated with my phone number in this highly interconnected world so dependent on internet for just about everything. Having recently acquired a brand new smart phone, I wanted my name back as the registered user of the number. I therefore applied for retransfer of the name to mine with the service provider and a new adventure started.

Let me not go into all the gory details but, suffice it to say that it was frustrating. My able secretary, my dear DIL also got frustrated as I was depending on her to get the mess sorted out.

Finally, after three weeks of toing and froing and innumerable telephone calls, complaints etc, the deed was done but, I was adviced that for 24 hours my connection would be disconnected to sort our their own internal problems. I agreed to that having no option but was not prepared for the connection getting disconnected for 72 hours! Immediately after the 24 hour period was over, I started enquiting about when the connection would be restored and after repeated phone calls and some threats to escalate the matter, the connection was finally restored.

During the 72 hours, those who wanted to contact me desperately, did on my landline as also I used the landline for outside calls. Since I had a WiFi connection at home other services like WhatsApp and Twitter worked and that helped keep my sanity. Particularly frustrating was my inability to use the OTP service for various online transaction during the three days. The saving grace however was the absence of promotion calls and SMS services though the same service was the reason for my not getting the OTPs.

This experience shared with a friend resulted in my getting to learn the new word “nomophobia”. No doubt that I suffer from it!

What a relief to get the connection back and great pleasure that the number is now registered in my name!

A Student Even Now.

I was ready. Two teachers appeared today in my life.

The thrill of learning something new is an amazing feeling. I keep getting this feeling often, particularly when learning new things from younger people.

Two young teachers appeared for me today.

First one was RH, an old colleague from the late nineties of the last century. I had written about him in my post The Right Question.

He sent me a WhatsApp message on our current political situation. I thought that it deserved a wider circulation and so tried to copy paste it and tweet it.

I have had a Twitter account now for quite a while though I am not very active in it. I have recently been inspired to use it by some other friends who use it more. I am still finding my way around the application and so found it puzzling when my copy pasted message would not be accepted by Twitter. The tweet button remained inactive no matter how many times I tried.

Enter my second teacher KS. I have mentioned him too many times in my blog posts to give a single link. Suffice it to say that, he is one of the few young people from whom I learn a great deal on many matters. He is a fellow alumnus from the same Business School that I am from and that is our connection. He is also a regular tweeter.

I sought his advice on why my copy paste was getting rejected and sent him a screen shot of the inactive tweet button. He promptly responded saying that there was a -151 message in the frame which meant that I had 151 characters more than the Twitter application allowed per tweet. I had seen the alert but did not understand the significance till KS explained it to me and advised me to either cut the message short or tweet it in two or three instalments.

And Bingo, it worked.

I do sincerely hope that I don’t get truly ready any time too soon and that these two teachers do not disappear from my life.

Life With Social Media


Zero without it, is how I would start.

I don’t use twitter unlike the guy in the cartoon. I however am quite active on FaceBook and WhatsApp.  These two are enough to give me sufficient activity to keep me out of mischief. It has now come to that stage where I wonder how I lived without these two tools and also the facilitator that makes it possible, the smartphone!

Shackman had suggested the topic for this week’s LBC Friday post. You can see what the other writers of the LBC have to say in their respective blogs.  Maria, Pravin and Shackman.

Pessoptimism.

This post is primarily to see if it will link to my twitter account. My friend Joe suggested that I do so, so that good posts can be tweeted by him to his followers. I have linked to my twitter account and let me see what happens when I post.

My regular readers will recollect my post on pessimism and optimism and the very interesting discussions in the comments on it.

One of my regular readers, who would rather direct his comments to me by hitting the reply button on his email program when he gets my posts by email, even suggested that I should call myself a pissimist for using the cartoon! Some people have an odd sense of humour. Anyway, to satisfy him, I have included another cartoon here.

For some strange reason, optimism seems to be a favourite topic of the season. There is another review in the NYT today which makes for interesting reading, though I do not intend buying that book. I have enough backlog pending to be read.

Twitter Trouble.

Mr Paul Chambers let off some steam by twittering about his frustration with the snow bound world around him and ended up being arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist!  Poor young man was just planning to fly to Ireland from the Robin Hood airport and see where he landed up!

We have our own Mr Chambers here in India, a suave relatively young politician who was a diplomat in the UN. He is currently a junior minister in the Central Government and belongs to the Congress Party. He is tech savvy unlike the barnacles that populate the Congress Party and has come under quite a bit of fire for his adventures on Twitter. I leave my readers with three links to see how comic the whole affair is with a man with a sense of humour and fluent in the use of English facing a Party full of self important humourless yokels.
1. Holy Cow
2. Cattle Class
3.Visa rules.

It is a remarkable country, India is. It provides free entertainment every morning in its newspapers for people like me with a twisted sense of what is right and what is wrong. Our cartoonists like Ninan and Laxman lampoon our establishment so well that they have become icons themselves.