They say that the secret to great wealth is to sell cheaply to many. However, like a lot of things ‘they” say, this is total bollocks. It is rather better, after all, if you’re a salesman, to sell one Rolls Royce a month as opposed to one South-Bank hot-dog an hour.

A word on those things, by the way – a microbiologist friend of mine reports that a student of his analysed one of the pork-tubes once (in order to further his despicable vegetarian agenda with quasi-scientific black propaganda, but this pushing it, for digressions, even for me). He found out that it was mostly trotter, and those bits of it that weren’t trotter were cartilage, and the whole thing would – in terms of the damage it would do to someone foolish enough to try & digest it – have about the same effect as injecting a syringeful of suet directly into your neck. But apparently the onions are OK.

That same student never, as far as I know, got around to researching the effects of trying to inject a Rolls Royce into someone’s artery but the financial comparison stands even if the nutritional comparison doesn’t; it’s hard enough to get a punter to part with their hard-borrowed cash in any event, so if you’ve managed to con them into reaching for their wallet you might as well get them to hand over £lots instead of £little.

Rather like upping the bets in poker, though, you do have to do this in increments, otherwise you’ll scare them right off and you won’t get a dime. Charging £269 for an iPhone, for example.

Now, I have – in previous columns – stated quite clearly and deliberately that I am no economist. I do not pretend to have any grip on pricing-strategies, or any deep, Zennish comprehension of the market, and the only instinct that I have for money is my strange ability to jump out of the way before the metal cage clangs down around the cashpoint I was attempting to use half a second previously (a word to my bank – you’ll never take me alive).

As such I do not presume to tell the world anything about finance, since that would be rather like Gordon Ramsey giving a lecture to a Tourettes support-group. As the great philosopher Dylan once said, though, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And I know that you measure wind on the Beaufort Scale, but I have no idea how you measure the desperation of O2 salespeople. The ‘we’re f*cked” scale, perhaps, or possibly the ‘can I use that noose after you’re done with it” scale.

Ironic, isn’t it. You can imagine their finance guys looking at the total number of iPhones sold on the first day and saying: ‘Oh. Two.”

Again, I am no businessman. But, opening night at the O2 store in my city and there were twelve staff in the store itself and another outside, hawking out flyers. And how many customers were there inside? Three. One of them was me. The other was my friend Al, rather cruelly winding up the salesman about the data-rates. I recognised the look in the salesman’s eyes – it reminded me of myself, when I approach a girl in a bar and she doesn’t immediately mace me; it’s that mix of unbelieving hope, mixed with the knowledge it’s almost certainly a wind-up.

The third customer, by the way, was just asking how he could put a tenner on his credit. We left him surrounded by five staff trying to incite him into spending £259 more than he wanted to, all of them with an always-be-closing attitude that you only normally see on Foxtons staff or $cientologists.

Poor man. I don’t think he got out of there alive.

Anyway, what’s the solution for O2? Well, there isn’t one. They’ve dropped their trousers & grabbed their ankles in return for Apple granting them exclusivity and now they’re finding that the relationship, like all bum-love, isn’t actually likely to bear fruit. It’s not the iPhone’s fault – we’ve all felt the strange stirrings of love for that delectable little creature, memory qualms aside – but avarice has derailed what could have been a quite beautiful & total & instant domination of this country. Whether Apple are to blame by too high an RRP or whether O2 & CW are being too possessive with the contracts is up for debate but instead of selling cheaply to many – or indeed selling dearly to few – it’s been pitched bang-slap in no-man’s land. And the momentum, the hype, is leeching out & dying on its arse as we speak. In a week or a month nothing will have changed except that the excitement & novelty value will have atrophied. And in a month it’ll be Christmas, which, I think, isn’t going to be a very jolly one for a certain network.

So it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a missed opportunity. We’re all going to get one, but the point is that we should all have them right bloody now. The only negative effects it’ll really have will be those relating to the delays further down the line; say what you want about the device, what it will do, its real blessing, is to up the game of every other network, every other manufacturer and – more importantly – up the game of the consumer. As it drags us all kicking & screaming into a bold new age of…well, I don’t quite know…not quite mobile computing, but not far off…

The slight bungling of its launch here just moves the day further back when we’ll be moving onto its heirs & successors. And you can’t even begin to imagine the sort of hype they’ll roll out for that.

There is a growing fashion, in the world of online publishing (the self-same world, my dear, sweet, reader, into which you are currently dabbling your delicious little toes) to consider the news itself as being something newsworthy. This is currently affecting out worlds by stories about stories – ‘iPhone coverage reaches frenzy” being one example – and although some people think this is all good and useful I, personally, would rather take a garlic-crusher to my own eyeballs than consider penning something like that – news sites reporting about news always remind me of that rather sinister Greek symbol of the snake eating its own tail, which just goes to show that evolution blessed us with a gag-reflex for a reason.

As such the only mention of the iPhone from me this week will not be any essays on how to survive a night out camping outside your local Apple store (buy a piss-proof tent, buy a petrol-proof sleeping bag, don’t take a dump in the shopping-centre fountain) or on the etiquette of queuing once you’re in (avoid all eye-contact, lest someone talk to you) or indeed on how best to stump up the cash to pay for one (God gave you a spare kidney for a reason). No, the only mention that little slab of joy will get (apart from the two so far already made) will be just a note about its design, which means that, at least, it should be pretty easy to clean.

I am, I should just mention, quite a clean person. This isn’t to say that I’m cursed with hand-bleaching OCD, but just to say that I do the washing-up before the mould on it is granted the right of self-determination by the UN, and also that I do actually clean the oven a few times in any given year. One thing, though, that does rile me just a little is when my handset du jour gets caught by a random glancing stream of light that shows up the inevitable patina of eargrease that gets stuck to the screen of it.

Again, I should state here and now that, as a male in my 20s, I’m well past the stage of getting greasy skin. My teenage years were remarkably spot-free and so I’m at a loss as to where this crap comes from. Every single phone I’ve ever, ever had has accumulated it, the only difference, as time goes by, being that handset-designers apply less & less angularity to their products, if only to stop all the gunk building up in corners. Presumably this is why condoms aren’t square.

Anyway, I get it, you get it, everyone gets it. One swipe along your trouser-leg and it’s gone. Eargrease is obviously a massive and damning hazard to our industry, akin to cave-ins to coal-miners or to falling trees to lumberjacks and I’m sure that one day all us readers of SMStextnews.com will be stood in front of Parliament, waving placards and demanding our MPs protect us from this terrible, terrible curse but, and you must brace yourselves, now – there are worse things to get encrusted in your keys.

Imagine the scene – it’s last Saturday night. It’s a Halloween party. Fancy-dress is obligatory and I attend this extremely-enjoyable piss-up as one of my favourite disturbing characters, a chap from the League of Gentlemen called Papa Lazarou. After using a lot of Blue-Peter-style ingenuity to fashion my own top-hat (including – you’ve guessed it – a lot of double-sided sticky-tape) the rest of the costume was basically daubing myself in thick black stage make-up.

Me and stage make-up, by the way, are no strangers, given that I have been in…one or two films that…well. Let’s just say I’m not too proud of them. Anyway, the thing to remember when wearing make-up is that it’s a complete bastard to get off. So there I am, drinking & scoffing at this party, and I’m thinking – ‘mustn’t answer phone whilst ears are coated with shoe-polish, mustn’t answer phone whilst ears are coated with shoe-polish”, and all is well. Until the booze does what the booze always does, i.e., makes you forget important things (like where you live, why you shouldn’t accept sweets off of strangers & why not to clasp an expensive piece of electronics to your head when you’re painted up like a black & white minstrel).

I wake up the next day and my phone looks like an elephant’s shat on it.

It didn’t even look that bad after Glastonbury. It was sat there, on a shelf by my bed, covered in a cracked, dried crust that totally obscured what it was. It could’ve been anything, from an ingot of finest cannabis resin to being a slightly overdone brownie. Normally, though it’s the case that a quick swipe with a cloth, maybe some hot, soapy water and you’re fine. In this instance, though, I was finding out that hot, soapy water wasn’t even getting it off my face (nor, indeed, from out from my pillow).

Getting sudden, unexpected sloshes of water in your delicate electronic kit is worrying. And there’s no more worrying place for this to happen than in your handset (with the possible exception of your submarine’s engine), so you can understand why I was reluctant to take my much-abused little mobile into the shower with me. So I tried everything I could think of; chipping off the bigger lumps with toothpicks. Attacking it with a boot-brush. I even thought about ironing a piece of brown paper on top of it, like you do with wax stains, which was a magnificent plan foiled only by my lack of brown paper. And my lack of an iron, for that matter.

In the end, though, I had to bite the bullet. I had to traipse to the chemist and – after persuading the startled girl behind the counter that no, she wasn’t my wife now and that no, I wasn’t actually Michael Jackson and that yes, I would like some make-up remover, if at all possible, if it wasn’t too much bother, yes please thank you NOW! So you will be glad to hear that my face is now back to its normal pasty complexion and my phone does now look like a phone again, albeit one covered in bits of toothpick and with the numbers burnt off all the keys by the acetone

What did strike me about this whole tragic little episode was this one, simple fact – that women have to do this every bloody day…

It’s Friday afternoon, and therefore we once again welcome our weekly columnist, Ben Harvey.

They do this, every now and then. Someone comes out with a report, or a proposal, or a consultation on Pmpisp, which isn’t – as it sounds, the name of some short, camp Swiss composer (you can see him now, snuffling into his chocolates because he can’t think of any good tunes that aren’t about war-gold) but is, in fact, a freshly-minted acronym I’ve just made up to allude to people who want to Put Mobile Phones In Stupid Places.

There’s always a constant murmur of um-ing & ah-ing, mostly as to the Underground, with people trying to convince Red Ken to install aerials or cables or boosters or whatever little boxes will enable people to yell into their phones above the wail & shriek & rattle of the tube. It makes a lot of sense, in certain spheres, in that in any given day there’s about three million commuters, a captive audience in their cattle-truck rolling-stock, going to & from work with nothing to do but read skanky free newspapers that shed cheap ink all over you. When the very fact that they’re penned-in and listless means that they really ought to be texting! It’s a criminal waste. Absolutely criminal.

So, even though it would be handy for consumers – and enormously lucrative for the permanently cash-strapped underground network, since they’d have the networks over a barrel – to put this kit in, it’s never happened. A lot of people say that the technical challenges are just too difficult, or that Ken Livingston won’t give his permission simply because he takes the tube to work himself and doesn’t want to get calls from the office for an extra two hours a day.

The real reason, though, in my unhumble opinion, is because it’s a stupid idea. Some places you just need to shut up, to be alone with your thoughts, to process the past or the future; and for that you need the present, the now, to take a backseat. Not all of us want to talk all of the time – it’s quite normal, quite human, to want to cocoon away for a short time every now and then to just get off the ride, so to speak. That’s not to say it’s antisocial, or that it’s withdrawn or shy, it’s just the fact that sometimes you just want to get away. And, if – like most people – you can’t control when you can shut the world off then you can at least enjoy it when the world is the one shutting you off.

So the news that the groundwork is being laid to allow full mobile use on aircraft is, I think, a complete pig. As with the tube, a plane is a long, thin cylinder of bored people who are packed in tight enough to impinge each other’s personal space but, for some cruel & inexplicable reason, actually shagging anyone in transit is distinctly frowned upon. Especially if you’re the pilot. You’re not there for the hell of it, you’re there as a means to an end, which makes the whole event something that you endure instead of enjoy, and, obviously, people deal with this in their own way, either by reading, or watching the films, or staring out the window or, if you’re Peter Buck, by washing your sleeping-pills down with booze and then running around squeezing yoghurt over everyone.

The thing to remember here is that, the more people there are packed around you, the more valuable your privacy becomes. And so to have that invaded by the braying conversation of some buffoon sat three rows behind you would be torture. Imagine a similar flight to the one that Ewan took out to Los Angeles this week to go hobnob with our American cousins – eleven hours in a jumbo, where you can have up to thirty people sat around you close enough to squirt your yoghurt over.

That’d be sixty people for me, by the way, but only because I eat a lot of zinc and work my pelvic-floor.

Eleven hours listening to thirty conversations. Eleven hours listening to message-beeps. Eleven hours, when you’re trying to sleep, or read, and you can’t do anything except go gently mental because some inconsiderate dipstick wants to have an argument with his wife or a discussion with her accountant or wants to call their nutritionist to see if the airline food will give them the shits or not.

Jean-Paul Sartre stated that ‘hell is other people”. He was almost right – hell is other people when you can’t get away from them because, as I believe I may have mentioned before, everyone is normal until you get to know them. And there’s no better way to get a crash-course in how colossal a cock the person wedged in next to you is than to hear them bitch about how pointy your own elbows are whilst you’re pretending to be asleep.

…there’s also the small point about bombs being detonated remotely just by ringing a mobile wired into a golf-ball of Semtex, of course, but that’s just being pedantic, since al-Qaeda are quite a sporting bunch, really, and would never use anything so obvious, honourable lads that they are…

A little while ago, in the cinema, you may have seen Snakes on a Plane, where Samuel L Bad-Mother-Fucker-Jackson was trapped in the air with hundreds of vipers. This film came about through a bunch of drunk executives trying to come up with the most idiotic, chaos-filled plot in the least number words, and they did such a good job – by coming up with such a cheap, trashy idea – that they actually did make a proper movie out of it (you wouldn’t've seen this actually on a plane, though, for much the same reasons that they don’t show Titanic on cross-channel ferries or the Shawshank Redemption in prisons). But even Hollywood, with all its experience and imagination, could not brainstorm a movie plot as ghastly, as terrifying, as generally holistically & comprehensively distasteful as the irritating, frenzy-inducing claustrophobia bought about by the sanity-eroding burble of other people talking non-stop bollocks for what used to be a deliciously peaceful period of serene cloud-spotting. See? even the mere idea is making me froth and flail quite rabidly. Should this all come to pass, you could easily identify me at any point above the Atlantic because I’ll be the one trying to bite a window open in an attempt to let the air out and thus let blessed silence in.

The one upside to letting phones on planes, though, is that you’ll be able to call the police when the fights break out. Happy landings!

Back once again, our weekly columnist Ben Harvey.

People have often asked me when I’m going to come out of the closet. I mean, it’s not as if I haven’t dropped enough hints, over the years. All the innuendo, all the signs. But times have changed, and in these liberal, accepting days of personal freedom I feel able to come out and admit the truth to myself, to my friends and, hardest of all, to my parents.

Because, you see, I am a Tory.

There! I’ve said it. All those years of repression, of guilt, of the pant-wetting terror of being Found Out. All that laughing along when my friends made jokes at the expense of My People. Hoarding my secret literature under my bed and being very, very careful with my internet-history…it feels funny, this sensation of not having to hide who I really am any more. I wonder if there’s some sort of march I can take part in.

Anyway, I mention this because My People are mustering, coagulating out of the shadows and running together like hot mercury, all because we’ve finally decided that the forces of Evil Commie Socialism in this country are overdue for a damn good kicking. For example, these postmen! The postmen – or is it ‘postpeople” these days? ‘Postperson Pat” doesn’t quite scan, does it – are striking, are gang-f*cking the entire country because they’re upset that their statutory right to have twenty-eight tea-breaks a day and to be able to spend three hours on the shitter are being politely questioned by the people who pay them their wages.

It’s a bit of a grim trend, really. Firemen, tube-drivers, now the legions of posties, all whining for more cash, better pensions, more time on the can. They’re a red tide, dear reader, a vile flow of pinko slackers intent on eroding all that is good and noble in this country. Since the unwritten rules of good behaviour & gentlemanly conduct mean that we can’t actually roast these idiots on their own picket-line braziers without getting a sharp note from the UN we are, instead, going to have to go resolve this sorry state of affairs through the ballot-box. And although our election hopes rest on David Cameron – a man without a chin – he is at least in possession of a backbone, which is more than can be said for Gordon Brown.

Or should that be Gordon Yellow?

The postal strikes have hamstrung this country. They’ve transmogrified us into a third-world nation, where cheques really do go missing in the post, where pensioners go hungry, where the thesaurus I bought off eBay is delayed to the extent that I’m forced to use words like ‘transmogrified”. It’s humiliating. So; the course of action is clear. We can either give these work-shy Trotskyites what they want, and end up paying, say, some gutty Cockney tube-driver £40k a year to mutter snide remarks about standing clear of the doors* or we can just get rid of them.

I’m for the latter. The sooner people realise that human beings are essentially disposable, the better – if, say, the battery in your phone is malfunctioning then you wouldn’t think twice about ripping it out and replacing it with another one, pausing only to set fire to the defective chunk of lithium simply because it tells you not to in such big writing. As such we must tear these defective people from our midst, the only small problem, of course, being how to send them their P45s when there’s no mail.

So – where am I going with this, apart from the inescapable conclusion that Gordon Brown should be sentenced to a life of licking envelopes in some otherwise-empty sorting-office somewhere? Well, I just thought I’d gloat, partly in The Enemy scoring a set of own-goals that portray them as having all the competence, courage & influence of those Suicide Bakers who tried to blow us all up with chapati flour last year. Most of my gloating, though, is due to the economics – the repercussions that mean that whilst you can try and derail the lines of data and correspondence you can never actually stop the message getting through; you can only divert it.

And what did people do when they couldn’t send post? They made telephone calls. They sent email and e-faxes. They punted everything over to intranets. The only organisations that couldn’t adapt were moribund government departments, direct-mail & subscription providers, companies supplying low-priority goods and those firms whose admin managers are too set in their obsessive-compulsive ways to do anything even vaguely differently.

Higher call traffic = kerching. Higher data-rates = kerching. You can have as many strikes as you like, my card-carrying darlings, because for us in this industry it’s a little Christmas every time you do. Which does beg an interesting question; is the mobile world vulnerable to industrial action, at all…?

Happily, the answer is “almost certainly not”. It’s vulnerable to blackmail, yes, and to extortionate wage demands from BOFHs who know where all the skeletons are and, as the demarcation between call-networks and data-networks meld further into the internet it might be the case that, one day, we’re bought to our knees by a spotty 15 year-old and his million-strong legion of virus-slaved PCs. But a strike would obviously only be a problem if it came from those people who could knock out swathes of coverage, services & routing at the flick of a switch, so it’s just as well that we pay the technicians in the business so very well, isn’t it?

God. I should stop giving them ideas…

*oh no…hang on! We’re doing that now!