Reasons to carry cash

[Regulator]

I know a place where mobiles are not allowed. If I contact my friend that works there, I know I won't get a reply until after work.

The reality is they're relatively few and far between these days.

We have got to the stage now where the government is banning the use of pagers in hospitals and mandating the use of mobile phones. 

[rob]

I know a place where mobiles are not allowed. If I contact my friend that works there, I know I won't get a reply until after work.

When I worked in a bank you weren't allowed to use mobiles on the floor and you had to go into the adjoining corridor to have a conversation.   The compliance team walked round the floor during the day to keep an eye on people.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I know a place where mobiles are not allowed. If I contact my friend that works there, I know I won't get a reply until after work.

When I worked in a bank you weren't allowed to use mobiles on the floor and you had to go into the adjoining corridor to have a conversation.   The compliance team walked round the floor during the day to keep an eye on people.

That's more the kind of place I expected to hear about, as well as sensitive industrial processes and similar.

[trekker12]

Sizewell nuclear power station prevents access with a phone. Some bits you used to be able to go in but they would put a sticker over the camera and check the sticker was still there at every security door but I haven't been there for ages. My work mate goes into the even more sensitive bits than I ever went in and he has to leave his phone in a locker at security.

There are a couple of oil refineries left in this country which have ATEX zones and a high risk of sparks causing a fire so you still can't take your phone in - the same rules do actually apply to petrol stations but no-one bothers anymore. I try to leave or at least go to the pump a long way from the person having a conversation whilst pumping flammable liquids into their car surrounded by vapour. Also, there are several manufacturing plants (pharmaceutical and petrochemical mostly but flour mills fall into the category) where ATEX applies due to dust environments and you don't want to be near a powder explosion.

The chances of a phone actually sparking a vapour or flammable dust are incredibly low but electrical equipment of any kind has to be rated to the zone it is being carried in. Also, in my petrol station comment above, phones are always on, receiving and sending data, as are the cars they are bluetooth'd to so presumably the hazard assessment on modern phones/cars etc for petrol stations has been done by the manufacturers but it will probably say somewhere the phone is kept in the car rather than being taken into the shop for use as a payment device.

Apart from petrol stations none of the places I list above use cash - the few that still have cafeterias aren't in zoned areas

[Regulator]

I know a place where mobiles are not allowed. If I contact my friend that works there, I know I won't get a reply until after work.

Spearmint Rhino?

[Kim]

The chances of a phone actually sparking a vapour or flammable dust are incredibly low but electrical equipment of any kind has to be rated to the zone it is being carried in. Also, in my petrol station comment above, phones are always on, receiving and sending data, as are the cars they are bluetooth'd to so presumably the hazard assessment on modern phones/cars etc for petrol stations has been done by the manufacturers but it will probably say somewhere the phone is kept in the car rather than being taken into the shop for use as a payment device.

The intrinsically safe electronics rules make sense.  It's just the irony of them applying somewhere where large, hot, statically charged machinery that's actually designed to generate high voltages with a view to igniting flammable liquids is operated by the general public makes it seem a bit silly.

Petrol stations are one of those things that will seem incredibly reckless with hindsight.

(The early car phones put out enough RF that they could probably upset a sufficiently electronic petrol pump up close and personal, so there was some logic there...)

[FifeingEejit]

Really?  I've been in and out of the MoD and a number of bases (most recently DNRC Stanford Hall), the DHSC and the Cabinet Office in recent months.  I've been through security in each and never been asked about my mobile phone.

The only places in the last five years where I've had to surrender my phone were a prison and an immigration detention centre.

I've been in the Scottish Parliament a couple of times and IIRC the restriction was to turn it off.
Which of course means the RFId transmitter is also off.

We have got to the stage now where the government is banning the use of pagers in hospitals and mandating the use of mobile phones.

Isn't that to do with the creaking infrastructure they're paying to keep maintained to allow bleeps and pagers to keep working?


We're not meant to have phones on our desks... That's more to do with some people taking the piss.


As for petrol, wasn't that a Bramniac test?
Load a caravan up with jerry cans and see how many phones it took to make the thing explode.
They got their exploding caravan but it wasn't triggered by the phones IIRC.