Ian Morris

Thursday 31 January 2008, 9:19am

Text this 15 digit code to this five digit number to order a pizza

I love my mobile phone but I hate making and receiving phone calls on it. It's one of life's great contradictions. My phonecall phobia does, however, mean I'm always on the look-out for non phonecall-related things to do with my mobile.

Sadly, one of the things I'll never do with my phone is text an order for something, be it a pizza or a National Lottery ticket. My reluctance to entertain these ideas is down to the level of concentration needed to get the system to work. It doesn't help that the process is almost always ill thought-out.

For example, Domino's offers a text-message delivery option, but you have to set it up on a computer and pre-define your choice of pizza, and you can only have it sent to a registered address. What use is that? If you have a computer, you might as well just order the damn thing online -- which, by the way, is a brilliant system that I love.

The National Lottery system seems just as unbearably convoluted too. You must first register online and enter your phone number, then you have to text a code such as 'TBALL' to a five-digit number, making sure to tell it how many lines you'd like to play followed by your numbers. It then texts you back to confirm. Oh, and it costs an extra 20p on top of your ticket to jump through all those hoops.

No, mobiles are great for all sorts of things, but buying pizzas and entering the lottery aren't among them.

NOTE: If you'd like to comment on this blog post, please text 'blog' plus your name, bank account number, sort code and shoe size, followed by your message, to 834848*.

*_{Please don't do this, I'm just joking. You may, however, use the incredibly simple comments box below to agree with me.}

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