Phone service

Phone service
The new iPhone has been staggering users, first with its gizmo-good-looks, then with its functionality and now, about a month after it was launched, with its bills. It is not that the tabs are that high, but the bills are enormous, physically speaking, numbering about 300 pages in some cases. They could have been the first-draft manuscript of a novel and full of as much fluff, one user told us. Exhaustive details are given, from the SMSes to the file size of each download. The bill arrived at the user’s home in a box, not an envelope. Apple has now decided to cut the excess and give it to customers only if they ask for it.

Car in a million
The ‘old lady’ of the Indian roads has done it again. Two students of history from the UK drove a doughty Ambassador from Calcutta to London, covering 9,000 miles in about two-and-a-half months. The young men rattled  their way through the arduous journey for Future Hope, a charity for Indian street children, but found that the hardest part of the entire adventure was “fixing the bureaucracy”. The car held up, with generous applications of duct tape and a few prayers, and managed to get the duo through Pakistan and China, then through Central Asia into France and on to England. Along the way, they developed a theory that they found to be true: “The worse the roads, the friendlier the people.” The trip has raised over £12,000.