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13/11/2011
Issue 64

With only three weeks to go before the lifts open there is something missing around resort. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I know it’s pretty essential to a ski resort. I’m sure it will come to me later.

You can imagine if you travelled to some far off third-world country and needed a mobile phone the best you could find would be some refurbished nokia 5110, a perfectly capable phone back in the days when talking to someone was the only thing you used a phone for. I remember because it was the first contract mobile phone I owned. But you would expect France to have almost identical phones and talk plans especially as most of the European telecoms carriers are owned by the same parent companies.

So it’s very strange how two countries which are situated so close to each other and share so many values, including parts of the language, can have such different idea about telephone contracts.

I speak, from personal experience, of course about the French version of Orange (although SFR, Bougtel et all are as guilty). Currently my mobile needs consist of a UK pay as you go mobile using O2 and a French PAYG mobile from the aforementioned Orange. One of these I am incredibly happy with and the other I would like to see put up against a wall (when the revolution comes).

In the UK any credit I buy on my O2 number stays there with apparently no time limits. So any credit I have before a winter season is still there in May. By comparison Orange have taken a leaf out of the Mission Impossible playbook without the sinister "This phone credit will self-destruct in 5 minutes" message and use a virtual stopwatch to tell me when my credit is about to expire and then when it has expired usually after only a month and then cancels the number completely after another couple of months of unuse. Meaning credit has to be wasted or constantly topped up before the sim self destructs.

Now before I get told to suck it up and take out a French contract and buy an Iphone , a thought that has crossed my mind more than once, until I'm gainfully employed such an option is not financially viable.

Which bring me to another point, When's it going to snow?

The editor

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