Hospitals and traffic jams: The difference a phone makes

My nephew is currently in hospital.  Staying in a hospital isn't usually a barrel of fun, not having access to your mobile makes a bad situation worse.

Fortunately the hospital where my nephew is has a sensible policy towards mobile phone usage.  We can call him, he can call us.  And, whether it's his mum or dad that's staying with him, we can call them too.  This makes a huge difference, not just in terms of cost (Patientline is very expensive) but in logistics!  So everyone is on the same page when it comes to who's visiting, when, what they need to bring down, traffic conditions, status and current mood of the patient himself!

With mobiles allowed it also means mobile internet, email and Slingplayer!

As for traffic jams... a serious accident closed the motorway (freeway) yesterday so our journey home was about 4 to 5 times longer than it should've been.  With three young kids in the back of the car this would usually be a problem, especially when their DS's ran out of charge.  However, with two internet enabled mobiles, TomTom, Slingplayer and a couple of pre-loaded episodes of The Simpsons - it went quicker than it would've without that lot!

TomTom couldn't really help us avoid all the traffic - but it did keep us up-to-date on where we were and a pretty good estimation as to how how much longer we'd be stuck if we kept to the same speed of crawl.

Google News told us more about what happened to cause the queues but not much else

The Highways Agency's internet radio station told us what we already knew but would've been useful had we not already known it!  Word of mouth works just as well sometimes.

Pre-loaded Simpsons kept them amused for a while, as did 'Whose Line is it Anyway?' (on satellite TV via my Slingbox)

A bit of browsing by the eldest and then finally the last few miles letting them use TomTom to see if we're there yet!