A few years? The numbers on my mobile wore off after a few WEEKS! People are amazed that I can text any messages as quickly as I do... but it means that no-one steals my phone..... why steal one with no numbers?

As for sewing machines - I agree. I'm happy with my front, back and zigzag, but repairing it when it throws a wobbly is just getting ridiculous!

I counted last night, in my bedroom alone there are 4 red lights (2 on the phone, one to tell me it's charging, the other to tell me if someone is using it - it goes green when someone is) and 2 digital clock displays. If I wanted to, I could have 9 digitally displayed timepieces. Add those to the 6 clocks about the house and I'm really not looking forward to the next time the clocks change..... thank heaven at least 3 are just a touch of a button and one does it automatically. There's still one around we didn't bother changing last year!

I wonder how much power is used by all these machines sitting on standby permanently..? I read somewhere that enough power is used by one 10 storey office block with computers on standby in one night, to light a bulb for some ridiculous amount of time like a decade. (OK, I possibly exaggerate, but it was a ridiculous amount.... I know our bills went down when I started turning the old computer off rather than leaving it on standby, along with several other bits of equipment used rarely).

Part of the problem is that these things do not have an OFF switch. Everything has to be ready immediately, so it's all on standby. I remember waiting for the TV to warm up, the radio to get going and my dad going round every socket, switching off and unplugging at night. We don't even do that when we go away now... the sockets are all stuck in such stupid places that are obscured by furniture or inaccessible corners (one is so low down it has to be upside down or you can't plug anything in because the cables are in the way), that you can't reach half the switches anyway!

Half the time people tell us to save power and the rest of it, they sell us stuff designed not to be switched off. It's a no-win situation that we have to work around...

LTS