5. Insurance. Oh dear. I paid you £7.50 a month for a comprehensive policy, including accidental damage. When my phone stopped working, firstly I had to work out the magic words to say: not, apparently, “it’s stopped working”, in which case you were not prepared to help me, but “it got dropped in water” or “I lost it”, in which case you were. How stupid do you think your customers are? How many conversations are suddenly interrupted at that point by the sound of a flushing loo?

A rant against O2 but it actually probably applies to most mobile operators... (at least, as an O2 customer, that's what I tell myself :-) ).

The joke about the "it got dropped in water" thing is that I've actually had staff in shops tell me explicitly that that is what I have to say in order to get cover for a phone that has just "stopped working". Except it's not a joke because every time they say that either our premiums go up a tiny little bit or some people (like me as it happens) who are too honest to lie about such things (I blame my parents) miss out because of their honesty :-(

In my case, Apple came good and replaced my iPhone 3G for only slightly more than the excess on my insurance policy... but, again, they only did this because I found another form of magic words, "the battery life is rubbish (compared to what it was when I bought it)". A simple "it's stopped working" would have cost me an extra 100 quid!

A book of QR codes.

Not sure I'd have the patience to read it tbh... but I like the comment about 'secret passageways taking us from the “real” to virtual world'. Of course, plain ol' URLs function in the much same way, though without the blockiness! :-)

Remember how weird it looked when you first saw a URL on the side of a bus?

O2 launches its free nationwide Wi-Fi broadband network today, pitting the UK's largest mobile operator head-to-head with rivals including BT and The Cloud.

The Spanish-owned operator will open up free Wi-Fi access to all internet users, including customers not with O2, through partnerships with restaurants, shops, and high-street retailers across the UK.

O2 said it will double the number of premium public internet hotspots – those which do not piggyback on existing residential networks – currently offered by rivals by 2013. O2 claimed it is the only "genuinely free" Wi-Fi network and the only one open to customers from other companies.