"Continue in offline mode?"

I'm not sure how long these things are meant to last but this has been in my portable telephones since I first got one in the autumn of 2000. It happily survived the events which killed two handsets and forced me to retrieve crappyphonecam from retirement but on Wednesday it kept dropping its connection and on Thursday refused to connect at all so was replaced on Friday evening with an extremely swiftly-delivered (ordered at about 21:50 on Thursday and arrived in the post on Friday morning) replacement which happily connected without an hitch. Although it fitted quite neatly into my current handset the large dimple visible in one of the contacts is a result of the rather harsh SIM-locking mechanism present in the bad-move K800i which died at the tender age of six months in the rain almost a year ago and which may have had an effect on the SIM's insides. Maybe the rain-damage caused the handset to attempt to fry the SIM before it gave up completely in a telephonic well-I'm-taking-you-with-me last-gasp gesture of defiance. Maybe it's just muck rather than a burn-mark on the leftmost contact.

I wonder what I shall do with it... it's completely useless now and can't even be used as a museum of the numbers stored on the SIM for the two years before I had a handset with a memory of its own to store proper full-length names on but I'm extremely bad at throwing things away and will probably keep it somewhere in a drawer with some old batteries and receipts.