Seconded on their usefulness on the road. Incredibly easy to just reach over, hold the PTT button and get your message across. One time purchase for something that won’t get shut down or unsupported ever.

If you try communicating with a phone, the only safe way to do it (assuming one person per vehicle) is to start a phone call before leaving, and keep it running constantly. If you have a passenger, they become your secretary. If the call drops then that’s all comms lost until both pull over and redial. Requires mobile coverage everywhere on your route which in Australia isn’t the case, even on major routes like A1 Bruce Highway.

Walkie talkies are king for travelling with mates

I think my initial shock was that he’s my supervisor and couldn’t even identify that it was a standard outside of the Galaxy S5, so it brings any IT knowledge of his into question.

That being said, he was pretty open about us technicians knowing more about the nitty gritty computing than he did, so his lack of IT knowledge wasn’t a major issue as he was a decent team leader, which I found more important to his position.

I had a boss who called that connector the “Samsung plug” when I had an external HDD and was trying to find a cable for it. I had an S5 for years, so I knew exactly what he was talking about, not that it quelled my shock given he was the team lead of IT support.

Needless to say he was (and still probably is) a huge Samsung guy