No history and its consequences

Forget 1066, the Armada and the British Empire, Tom and I are new untarnished babies when it comes to financial services. And our first encounter with this has been through the phone companies.

Having had the most basic of pay as you go phones in the UK - the horse and cart of the phone world, if you will - we have decided to upgrade in a major way to the private jets that are the iPhone or the Google Android. The decision is still to be made as to which but if in the next few moments you can imagine Tom as Einstein but with better hair, and me as Victoria Beckham but with natural tits and very bad hair, you will get the picture.

Tom: "open platform blah blah applications blah blah developers blah blah interface blah blah gobbledegeek"
Me: "but the iPhone is really pretty"

Oddly I haven't won the argument yet but this may be because Tom is somehow managing to appeal to my inner geek which after over ten years with him is surprisingly well-developed.

Anyway we have been visiting phone shops and as we are new and untarnished babes in the financial world, the options are somewhat different and usurious.

Shop 1 was friendly enough - home of the pretty phone. Yes we could have a contract but as we have no history they would require that we deposit our last born child with them for a year in order to prove our reliability. (I exaggerate slightly but it was $500 dollars per person.)

Shop 2 wouldn't offer us a contract but could offer us the geek phone. However the cost of the geek phone without a contract would rise from a small nugget of gold to the weight of my husband in bullion.

We haven't visited Shop 3 yet, soon to be offering the geek phone, but if it turns out the shop assistant will only give us a contract in exchange for the hand of my first born in marriage, then you're all invited to the wedding.