READERS of a more genteel disposition may wish to avert their gaze now – I’m going to tell you a tale that may occasion palpitations, faint-headedness and the possibility of a swoon or two: I don’t have a mobile phone and I’ve never had one.
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There! I’ve said it. I’m out of the closet.
As culturally impoverished as many will consequently conclude my day-to-day existence to be, I can assure them (once they’re off their mobiles long enough to listen) that I don’t want one and have never wanted one.
Folk will bluster, “but how does he tweet, twitter or twat?
How does he take photos of his take-away pizza and post the pickies for friends to Like?
How does he send emojis of little smiley, grumpy or quizzical faces that make the need for language redundant?”
The answer that I simply “don’t” will be lost on those Mongol hordes.
Actually, I can remember a time when you could find a public phone on just about every second block – as well as those installed on the footpaths outside shops and the banks of them lining the foyers of post offices.
A big difference then was that if you strayed too close to the booth when someone else was mid-conversation, you’d get a glare of hostility on the assumption that you were some kind of eavesdropping perv.
These days the din of a busy street is lost amid the bellowing of walking, strutting, sitting and driving (yes, still) conversations about the critical matters uppermost in the minds of scores of public blatherers.
Today, a few public phones every couple of blocks would be but a drop in the Pacific in catering for the need for babblers to communicate their every thought, whimsy and foot-fall to similarly minded simians who are apparently agog at every crumb of urgent information about who said what about you-know-who, Aunty Kate’s carbuncle, how the judge believed the load of old twang that we spun him or what Jim, the pig, said about the roast chook that you went to so much trouble to cook.
Riveting, timeless news – all broadcast loudly in the middle of the street just in case the man on the Clapham Omnibus might also find it interesting – the lot of it.
When did we become this way?
Shops, banks and what-have-you now have to put up signs asking people not to interrupt the process of buying a loaf of bread by making a call to someone to tell them that’s what they’re doing.
Theatres have to remind us to “Please turn mobiles OFF” – that’s right, “off”, not just onto vibrate so that you can have a bit of a whisper to someone you haven’t seen for two hours about what’s going on in the film or the play and what you are going to buy at intermission.
When did we become so brain-dead that we now need to be told these things (even though I’ll guarantee that at least one phone will sound while you’re in a theatre, mid-film, anyway)?
There seems nothing that is simply “good manners” anymore; perhaps we need signs like the ones that I remember on Sydney trams yonks ago that asked men to please not spit on the floor (they said “expectorate” but we all knew what it meant: hawking up a bushy).
I can see the usefulness of a phone in emergencies but where are all these emergencies?
Certainly nowhere near the silicon junkies interminably yakking on about nothing – that’s me next to them, mumbling “the horror, the horror”.