JON HONEYBALL

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“I’m tired of dumb items. It really is time that robotics and human-machine interactivity was lifted to a new level”

Remember Microsoft’s Barney? Well, Apple’s research team is upping the game almost three decades later with expressive robots that interact with you, and it might just be amazing

I have a few things on my mind this month. Let’s start with something that happened back in January when I was at CES in Las Vegas, along with Tim and Barry of this parish. I usually buy an eSIM for trips to the States from one of the online vendors. This not only provides a second number – always useful – but means I don’t get into any arguments over what is “acceptable use” on my “unlimited data” SIMs from UK providers.

This time, I decided I wanted to have a USA phone number, just in case I needed to get in contact with colleagues. My usual go-to provider, Holafly, wouldn’t be appropriate because its eSIM offerings are purely data. With hindsight, I should have remembered that the lab phone system runs on 3CX, and that I have the 3CX client on my phone. So my phone is just an extension number at the lab back in the UK, and this connects over data.

Anyway, I decided to give T-Mobile another go. I tried it a few years back and found it annoyingly clunky when setting up the eSIM. There is an app where you register, choose your plan and pay; the app then installs everything and sets it up appropriately. Back then, it wasn’t particularly seamless, but this time around it just worked. When I landed in Los Angeles, I enabled the eSIM.

Everything worked fine except for one wrinkle. I received an SMS message saying, “Teneya, are you still interested in dental implants? – Hillcrest Dental”. Obviously, I’m not Teneya, and I don’t want dental implants. A quick Google showed that there is indeed a Hillcrest Dental in Las Vegas, should you need some implants in a hurry.

So what had happened here? The message was an SMS so the number that had been assigned to me had been used before by Teneya. When I checked on the T-Mobile website(tinyurl.com/368tmobile) it clearly says: “Number Reuse: T-Mobile holds all numbers for a minimum of 45 days to a maximum of 90 days before making them available for reuse.”

Clearly, at some point, Teneya had a T-Mobile contract. For whatever reason, she’d cancelled her contract, and T-Mobile had thrown the number back into the pot and assigned it to my month-long eSIM purchase.