My colleague's voice was laden with sarcasm.

He'd seen me bent in concentration over the teensy little mobile I'd just taken from a handbag approaching the size of a Fiat Panda.

The phone is brand new and therefore, scary. In fact, it had taken me three days to summon the courage to take it out of its box and charge it up.

I didn't really want the thing in the first place. I was quite happy with my battered, three-year-old Nokia which I knew like the back hand of Meadowhall. But I was pressed into getting a new one by 3 Mobile.

Because my contract was due for renewal, they were keen to sign me up again and had inundated me with calls over several weeks.

A new phone was the carrot they dangled.

Only I'm not a phone fiend; I want the convenience of having a mobile, but I don't really care what it looks like or whether it can sing, dance or recite Shakespeare (now there's a thought).

I think it's an age thing, this notion of wanting a phone that is just a phone.

Most people of my son's age go through mobiles like they're... well, going out of fashion.

And I don't understand why a phone costing anything up to £500 should be viewed as a fashion accessory you simply replace on a whim and throw in a cupboard. (Unless you're one of those organised, ethical sorts who sends it off to Africa so that people who barely even have roofs over their heads can also speak to someone three doors down who is also lucky enough to have been sent a cast-off mobile from Britain with which to fry their brain).

Mobile companies who thrust shiny and ever more complicated new phones under customers' noses to entice them to sign up are only too eagerly stoking the fires of our greedy consumerism.

But seeing as my old faithful was getting a tad temperamental, I decided to take them up on their offer.

The new one is so slim it is virtually impossible to find in the Gaping Gill-sized chasm of my bag. And it has the capacity to do millions of things I'll never ask of it.

But the simple stuff - like how to change the ring tone, how to sort out predictive text and enlarge the script (most important as you approach 50) are, as yet, unfathomed. A bit like most of the features on my car, my sat-nav and my camera.

Hence the reason for our big handbags, chaps... We need room for all those instruction manuals.

READ MORE
Main news index
Your letters.
Features
Check out the very latest on South Yorkshire's roads - including live traffic cameras on Sheffield's commuter routes - with our Traffic section
Entertainment news.