Comms meltdown

I had a total and truly enraging comms meltdown yesterday. Both mobile phone and email went titsup simultaneously and as a result I didn't get several messages that would have stopped me driving 20 miles and waiting an hour for a cancelled event.
First, the credit on the payg phone I was using expired. And I reached the storage limit on my Google Mail account. So nothing was coming through at all. Damn and blast.
It shows how carefully you have to administer things if you want to keep costs down. I have a paid-for Yahoo! mail account (comes with BT Broadband), but the client is a big mess so I decided to access all my mail through my Gmail client which is much nicer and does threading etc etc. Transferring a couple of year's worth of email from Yahoo!! to Gmail took a few days (yes, days - I couldn't believe how treacly the whole process was) but once it was all set up it worked a treat. No having to look for mail in two places. Good.
Then I was warned that I had reached my Gmail limit. I deleted a whole bunch of stuff and thought no more of it. I still wasn't getting any email but hell, it was the weekend.
Later, I discovered that Gmail takes forever to delete stuff, so it was still refusing to take new messages for many hours afterwards. AND it was still clearing my Yahoo! inbox and deleting everything despite not accepting the messages - so all the messages alerting me to the cancelled event were lost.
I was using a payg phone because it was on loan for review. I normally transfer my own sim into review phones because then it works in a familiar way, but the Samsung Galaxy SIII, though a marvel, uses a micro sim and it is impossible to get my network, BT Mobile, to supply me with one curse them. So on this occasion I set up a divert and left the payg sim that came with the SIII in place.
Of course, it ran out of credit while I was out in the car on a Sunday afternoon, making topping the damn thing up difficult.
So, another fine mess. I will be angry about this all week. Fnack.