Adventures in a 3 store

Ok, I missed a day; there’s a good reason for it, involving this attractive Polish woman in Rugby.

No, it’s not like that (sigh). She was the sales assistant in the 3 shop; we travelled in on the 10.23, about 20 minutes from Braunston. (Best stop to catch it if tied on the towpath is the one by the car park for the renamed Boatman pub, formerly the Mill House.) She was very helpful but a little hard to follow at times, nothing to do with command of the language, more the sound track pouring out of the in-store speakers.

We’d planned to go for the Mi-Fi, but she persuaded me that the straight USB modem deal would be better. There was the usual faffing around with getting the contract sorted, but much better organised than T-mobile, who take photocopies of your driving licence and credit card, and then get unhappy when your signature doesn’t match the thirty year old one on the licence.

This time it was just a case of debiting 50p (twice) from the debit card for the account I’m going to use for the direct debit. Anyway, deal at last done, we got some other bits of shopping, mostly in Wilko’s, had lunch in Gregg’s, then caught the bus back.

Setting up the modem was straight forward, but then, oh horror, it wouldn’t allow a WiFi link from the Mac Mini to Sheila’s iBook, so we couldn’t be on line at the same time. There was nothing for it, back to the shop via the 3.23, leaving Sheila on anchor watch.

Further conversation established what wasn’t made clear at first - the USB modem will only allow one machine on line at a time, so was never going to do what we wanted. They made no bones about cancelling the contract, it just took forever, with much muttering over PC screens and calls to their help line.

Finally it was all done, and I had a £9.50 per month contract for a MiFi modem, rather than a £7.50 contract for the USB modem. This is on a 1 Gbyte per month limit, but experience shows that that should be ample for us, as we do very little heavy downloading.

The Huawei E3850 WiFi modem is as advertised; once charged it is easy to fire up, and does indeed become a private WiFi hot spot in the boat. Signal strength so far has been at least as good or better than T-mobile - it even connected whilst sitting on the desk in the boat in Braunston. Most of the time, I plan to hang it in a little bag in one or other of the side hatches. John Stanton off Acen, who first showed it to me, puts his on the roof, the WiFi being strong enough to connect from outside to inside, but that seems to me to be asking for it to be nicked.

Time will tell how good the coverage is, of course; I’m still inclined to get an O2 PAYG modem as well, as they have a £2 per day deal.

After all this charging about – the bus back didn’t leave until 5.40, so it was well after six before I was back at the boat – we didn’t bother to cook, but had a meal at the Plough, which doesn’t seem to have changed at all, despite the change of manager.

Today, we got up early, played with the new toy for an hour, then at half seven I nipped up into the village for top up stores, and we went round onto the service point and did our first self pump out on Sanity Again. That went very well, and we’ve ambled on round to Napton bottom for the night. Tomorrow, up the flight; we’ll probably tie above Marston Doles, as we are deliberately taking our time at the moment.