THIS is the true story about how a strange lady in Melbourne reminded me about telephone manners. On holidays, a few years back, I was walking down Chapel Street, Melbourne, window shopping. Ours were getting a bit hard to open and we needed new ones.
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At one point I was behind a woman who would suddenly grab her mobile phone and have an animated and loud conversation in some foreign language I couldn’t place, with whoever was calling her. No-one was calling, I suspect, because she did the exactly the same thing about four times in the space of 100 metres.
She spoke in a foreign language from Hungary, or Russia, or New Zealand so what the conversation was actually about was oblivious to me. I’m Australian, which is synonymous with “monolingual” – although I can translate some South Australian dialect (most of which is solely related to the availability of food and wine; so I can take a calculated guess).
Anyhow, this act – and I call it that deliberately – got repeated every minute; that’s almost more often than Gilligan’s Island!
And I got to wondering whether I was an audience of one watching a clever piece of street performance. That made sense because a large crowd for street theatre is usually measured in single digits anyway, unless it’s something like a pig dancing or Barnaby Joyce making a coherent speech.
Or might I have been observing a desperately lonely woman making her life bearable by pretending to talk to absent loved ones? In any case, I didn’t ask her because you never talk to crazies in the street; so she probably would have spotted me for one straight away and run a mile. Or called the cops. Or handed me the phone and said, “It’s for you” and then I’d have to lapse into my Year 10 French and ask a dead cell-phone if the window was open, or if they had a cat (the conversational limits of my French).
But it got me to thinking about our telephone manners today. I remember when telephone conversations were considered to be private; even in the street you’d glare at people standing too close to the public phone box and suspect that they were pervs.
Not so today – I can tell you about anything you ever wanted to know about people I’ve never met: who’s broken up with who and why; the state of Aunty Sally’s nectarine tree; why Janine won’t be going to the party – just ask me.
That’s merely by walking from the Marketplace to the Sturt Mall and keeping my ears open last Saturday.
People don’t just talk on mobile phones today – they broadcast like John Laws.
Some of it is just soap opera; some is like snippets from a spy show; but most is just inconsequential fluff like, “I’m at Coles just passing the garbage bins. Hey, where are you?” That’s not to mention the hands-free phone which is the next best thing to actually giving your full attention to driving.
The European woman walking down Chapel Street talking to no-one on her mobile phone revealed it all to me.
Her idea - or my idea of what was her idea - was that all such conversations are banal, repetitive and flatulent verbosity only aimed at convincing the rest of us that it is actually communication. “Hey, look at me, I’m on my mobile!”
Pffft! Real communication is nothing like that. But anyway, I hope that that Melbourne lady is now talking non-stop to her real friends and real family on a phone that works; and I think she’ll want somewhere more private.
