SIM Should Stand for “Sucks In Money”
It is Saturday and I am currently over at my disabled friend’s house. I usually come over on Sundays but my son is having a birthday party at my place this evening. As a result my house is in semi-chaos as he and his live-in girlfriend make preparations for the party.
So I decided the best plan for me was to bail out and come over to Mike’s for the afternoon.
It is sort of peaceful here. I get to surf around the Web and check out all my favourite sites. Mike just clicks away on his Farmville stuff that he has been ‘working’ on over the last few years. Occasionally one or the other of us thinks of something to say and we have a short, extremely deep, conversation about an important subject. Mike’s wife generally pops in at some stage and asks if we would like a cup of tea—to which the answer is always ‘yes’.
It was in this mood that Mike, out of the blue, turned to me and asked if I knew what SIM stood for.
I didn’t. Of all the acronyms and abbreviations that I know from all the time I have worked in computers I did not know what SIM stands for. I took a guess that the “m” might stand for modem. But Mike said “No!”.
Then he tells me SIM stands for “sucks in money”.
How friggin true is that. That explanation for SIM is perfect. They sure do ‘suck in money’.
The wireless modem USB dongle I use every week when I am away working costs me $40 a fortnight to recharge. That works out to about $1,000 per year. And I don’t do much while connected to the Internet but post an occasional posting to Abalook and check out my favourite technology sites. What chews up the $40 mainly is the odd download of a podcast from TWIT or NO AGENDA.
Then there are the SIMs in my mobile phone, my wife’s mobile phone, and my son’s mobile (yes, which I pay for). Those three come to another $2,038.80 per year assuming there are no excess charges for calls made beyond the ‘free call’ allowance.
So for me those four SIMs cost me over $3,000 per year.
Shit! Working that out was kind of depressing. But now you can see why SIM really should stand for ‘sucks in money’ because they make gobs of money for the telecommunication companies.
For anyone the slightest bit interested SIM actually stands for Subscriber Identity Module.
