One small step for man … (Part II)

Yesterday afternoon, and probably inevitably, by 4.30pm I was back at the phone shop.

Overnight in the wee hours I had set about the task of getting to grips with my new Huawei P30. I tried to establish in it my two email accounts, my preferred Apps and some new ones I was being offered, in order to fulfil my greater purpose of being able to take up from ‘where I had left off’ with my outgoing Sony Xperia version – and with only partial success.

I soon discovered that – in practically every move I made – I also had first to sign up to what turned into about half a dozen Huawei accounts or applications with which I was terminally unfamiliar having never come across them previously.

It wasn’t long before I began to realise that I was in trouble in the classic sense that the further I went, the less I knew what I was doing.

Or even, for that matter, where I had been.

One of my issues was that wherever I went, I was getting confused as to which password I should be using.

I began by using the same password for each item as I had done on my Sony Xperia – that was at least logical – but somehow it seemed that I also needed in addition a Huawei one for it.

Or at least for something else.

About ninety minutes into my exercise I was ‘losing’ it.

One of the overlaying factors was that that Byford and passwords do not have a happy relationship.

Received opinion and advice has it that – in order to protect one’s privacy (or is it data?) – one should set up very complicated and different passwords for each new item, the better to prevent those possessed of malicious, hacking or criminal intent from ‘breaking the code’ into more than one account.

Many of the ‘bad guys’ rely upon the inevitably tendency that most people over the age of fourteen to use the same password for multiple applications.

Thus if a hacker somehow gains access to (or control of) one of your passwords, he or she will then try using the same one to access others … and history records that in practice this is a both a logical and successful way to rip the ordinary citizen of his billions.

What I’m getting round to admit is that I think I may have fooled many of the bad guys who are after my state pension or perhaps my habitual 10p bets on the 2.45pm from Plumpton racecourse.

How so?

Well, because by 2.30am on the night before last – the one I am writing about – I seemed to have created half a dozen new different passwords for a similar number of new accounts … and I wasn’t quite sure whether the position I had reached was that I couldn’t remember which new password I had set up for which account – or whether, alternatively, perhaps it was that I couldn’t remember some or all of the new passwords I’d created anyway.

I just knew I was in trouble – and that that old adage “when you’re digging yourself into a hole, the best thing to do is to stop’ was applying.

It was about then that I remembered that the female assistant in the phone shop had said, as we parted after I’d paid for and taken possession of my new Huawei, that if I had any problems with “setting it up” I should go back in because they had a service whereby they could “transfer everything from your old phone to your new”.

It was thus that I walked into town yesterday to seek their help with just that task.

Some forty minutes later – and £25 lighter – I set off to return home again with a Huawei phone that (as far as I could tell) was “ready for use”.

I shall learn more today when I try to use it. One of the benefits of yesterday’s situation was that I received no phone calls at all.

Or, to put it another way and probably more accurately, I was aware of receiving none.

There was a reason for this, though I don’t know the explanation.

My Huawei was set up to take “emergency calls only”. It wasn’t connected to my service provider, or something, so I could neither make nor receive calls.

I quite enjoyed that experience.