Bit off more than I could chew with this apple

Moore Street used to be the epitome of auld Dublin but now resembles the street scenes from Blade Runner: an exotic mix of fruit and veg sellers, stalls offering designer bags of dubious provenance and rows of small shops selling supposedly smart phones.

The kids love, as they call them, the Chinese shops, and for the obvious reason that they sell iPhones and the like for knockdown prices. So the middle daughter was delighted with herself when, having cobbled together money from birthday presents and other unidentified sources, (CAB have nothing on my kids), she came home with a shiny new model which she held as if it was an artefact discovered in the ruins of an ancient castle.

Except it didn’t work. It did all the fancy slidey things iPhones are supposed to do, but fell short when required to make a phone call. So we brought it to the 02 shop and the man there solemnly diagnosed that the problem wasn’t the SIM card, but the phone.

Back in the Chinese Shop, the same smiling young man who sold the phone was there, but was quickly elbowed out of the way as soon as we mentioned a problem. His replacement was a squat, steely-eyed woman who machine-gunned heavily accented words at me, some of which may have been English, but which successfully relayed her reluctance to give me my money back. I could, however, give her more money and get a slighter better version.

I glanced between the hopeful face of my daughter and the scary face of the Chinese woman and handed over the cash.

But before we left the shop we swapped the SIM card and established this new model did work. My daughter’s delight was re-established, plus I had earned some kudos by knocking a tenner off the price. (Though I suspect it was what the Chinese woman planned all along).

All good. Except when we got it home and plugged it into iTunes it suddenly stopped working again. And yes, you don’t have to tell me: what a patent idiot I was to take another phone when the first one didn’t work from a shop that was obviously dodgy, selling phones that are probably all fake and made by seven year old slave children in Shanghai.

Except that when I googled the specific problem, (it’s do to with upgrading the operating system.. but I’d rather you stayed awake), it turned out that this time it wasn’t the phone, but the stuff that Apple puts in the phone. It’s a problem that has affected thousands of people around the world and for which there are any number of dazzlingly complicated solutions: and one that Apple, according to all these online critics, hasn’t solved.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that one shouldn’t judge the shop by the location or ethnicity of the owner. Of course the bloody phone still doesn’t work.