This week The Telegraph has been telling us shock horror stories of poor innocent mobile phone users on the White Cliffs of Dover who have found themselves expensively connected to French networks. As if this doesn’t happen all over Europe in border regions. Live in a city such as Maastricht and your mobile can be in Holland one minute, Germany the next and Belgium a little later. How do those poor people manage to avoid racking up enormous roaming charges? Simple, they turn off roaming, which is what the British should do when teetering on top of their white cliffs. Yet if they did, there would be no newspaper story.
Now the same paper gives us the surprising news that texting while driving can be dangerous. Even more dangerous than drving when drunk, according to an international study. Who ever thought that writing text messages while driving was remotly sensible? In a country where taking a bite out of a sandwich or sipping from a bottle while behind the wheel is an offence (but not, curiously, holding a lighted cigarette), it is surprising that anyone should consider texting at the wheel acceptable.
Both these stories point to one thing: A severe lack of common sense. And we don’t need an international survey to tell us that.
by Mike Evans, 15 March 2013