Apparently those people who never had
an old mobile may miss the point of my
impeccable logic. By "an old mobile" I
most certainly do not mean a Victorian-
era cot-contraption.

I mean a mobile telephone handset which
can, say, only compose SMS texts in
capitals.

I had one. But the battery got shorted out
one night I turned up at home without it
and, upin calling the number, discovered
it was behind the bar in one of the UK's
increasingly less numerous public houses.

With this phone it was a bit like having an
old mainframe terminal--it just could not
concatenate incoming messages as it had
not been configured to recognise the more
up-to-date delimiting characters.

As such anyone who sent an SMS which
ran to more than one bufferful relied upon
me receiving all the parts of the message
and Gricing them into some kind of a
comprehensible order.

I have no reason to believe this handset
would not work with a compatible SIM
today had I a suitable replacement battery.

As such it is entirely possible to receive
the last line of a poem sent by SMS way
before the first comes through.

Similarly, ceteris paribus, Crystal's rather
dimwitted, unchecked and, editorially,
felched assertion concerning the nature
of encoded exchange behaviour fails to
take account of signal strength; since I
got a more up-to-date handset I have been
in the position of receiving fragments of
multi-part messages which have only later
been collated and re-delivered as coherent
communications.

As either of these circumstances is about
as likely as some old scribe leaving a
scroll at its end as opposed to its very
beginning or somewhere in the middle
(to draw attention to an important verse,
say, regardless of context) I can only add
that his chicanery undermines the very
notion of academic rigour on which we
have built our reputation--if only with The
Americans and their fondness for computer
matriculated multiple-guess/menu-memory
examination techniques.

G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 SIPSTON
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