Maybe it’s just me… but I tend to ascribe value to time spent on pretty much everything.

Say a man is on £20* an hour. If he spends 6 hours on the internet comparing the prices of flights to save £25, in my books that is a loss of £95.

Here we are in the Phablet Generation. Not so much cool as a necessity for old eyes. That is the un-coolest thing ever. Photo: hardwarezone.com.sg

Let’s just say for the record that this same man, on £20* an hour, spends a further 10 hours (£200) researching a deal on “unlimited” data plans on 2 cellphones that cost £36 a month currently (£432/year each) and comes up with a deal for “unlimited” data for 2 new phones at £15 a month (£180/year each). That would be a potential savings of about £252 a year each. That savings of £504 sounds impressive until you subtract the time it took to sort it all out: Now our savings are down to £304 for the year, not inclusive of the 2 new handsets purchased to make it all happen. (Let’s not even talk about how much that cost…)

But we have cheap UNLIMITED DATA!

Name and shame: Unlimited is Limited. Photo: thenextweb.com

Only trouble is, these are not actually “unlimited,” in that you cannot toggle from your phone without being censured by a network suspension of 30 minutes minimum on account of you should not (according to the gods of “unlimited” data) toggle your phone to a computer. Ever. Goodness, if one did this, people everywhere would toss their routers out the window and toggle to their phones for … EVERYTHING. The internet would crash. The world would end.

So let us just suppose our hypothetical hero has saved his wife a bit of money on her phone (not inclusive of expensive new handset!), yet she has had to endure about £1,000,000.000 worth of grief on account of the other “deal” he has spent 20 hours (£400) researching: A new broadband provider.

Hmm… define service. Image: cellcentrenumbers.co.uk

Since hero and wife live in a rural location (I cannot, obviously, reveal the exact details of WHO I am discussing on account of the Data Protection Act and all), their previous broadband was provided by the national carrier, and though they were never able to achieve the stellar lightening-fast speeds of the in-town dwellers, they could at least upload photos to their blog or open their Facebook page in under 3 minutes. 

So, whilst said NEW PROVIDER is charging £3 a month for the first year which will increase to £13 after the first 12 months (as opposed to the previous £15 a month with the national carrier, a savings of £144 for the first year and £24 for successive years), hero and wife are forced to endure internet speeds roughly on par with those of 1994. Otherwise known as “dial-up” speeds. 

Now, that is time and energy well spent.

Mother Hen

*Not his real salary… Now, that WOULD be telling, wouldn’t it?

feature photo: Shutterstock

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