Smart Phones Fox Frustrated Users

20 years ago I thought a ‘mobile’ was a wind up toy for kids that had a ringing jingle. How little has changed. They are a wind-up for me. What did we do before this phenomenon? How did we ever manage to walk to the car without having to talk to people at the top of our voice?

My friend is a Community Psychiatric Nurse and has two. One for work and one for personal calls. On several occasions he has phoned me to mess with my medication or get me ‘sectioned’ just because he picked up the wrong phone by mistake. My wife has a ‘Coldplay’ ringtone. The envy of the other phone users. It’s her evil way to have you humming the bloody thing all day.

What has happened? Is society more ‘together’ for the use of this hi-tech communication? We have a mobile phone for every man woman and child in this country, but are we as a nation, more ‘communicative’. My daughter had a mobile for her eleventh birthday and because we live in ‘Holly and Jessica’ country, with that horror ever fresh in our minds, it seemed prudent that we foist one on her, just for emergencies. In the hope, that our child will have a means to call for help, God forbid, whatever the circumstance. Text messages helped to find the killer of Sally Geeson last week. Once again, on my doorstep in Cambridge, sadly, all too late for the twin, who used her mobile as a last resort to try to end her plight. It prompted a rapid find of her killer who had also already taken his life.

What does it tell us? It tells me that a mobile phone could save or kill you. People are stabbed for them. Cars are vandalised to get them. Yet, if your car is stranded in the wilderness, it is an absolute Godsend. So a blessing and malediction.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly …… mobile phones

In 1989 I had one of those giant shoebox size ‘mobile’ phones. It was like transporting a washing machine without a sack-barrow. It assumed the shape of the ‘likes’ that G.I soldiers in ‘Nam’ used in the field of combat. Except, you didn’t have to lug it across mud and barbed wire under mortar fire, and it was not camouflaged. I ask you how can you camouflage that hunk of junk? No wonder the brave troops in Laos painted it to blend in with the jungle. How embarrassing to admit to a mobile the size of landing craft? My conspicuous example had a tank ariel that would easily ‘have your eye out’, and with it’s wardrobe-d sized battery pack would kick-start Sellafield at a push. You had to stand on top of cars to get a signal and any excursion to the bank with it, would mean a slipped disc and your testicles rolling down the road behind you. You would lurch into the pub and clump it on the table sending drinks flying. What happening to those hideous things? Are they used to power milkfloats or forklifts now?

No one would try and steal it from you because all you had to do was drop it on the assailant’s toes and wait for the Police to arrive.

Mobile phones carry this strange enigma. You know the cliché. “A lot of men standing in a room boasting about how small it is.” How tiny they got? How many people who still, stop dead, dropping their shopping everywhere, to answer its tone? Nobody thought things through with the design and production of cargo pants. Fifty pockets of varying shapes and sizes, zipped and buttoned, on one trouser leg alone, and the Nokia is never in any of them.

People now judge you by your phone and tone. I am seriously contemplating walking into the stock exchange with the old standard ‘Dog and Bone’ twist cord ‘jobbie’ from old black and white films. Hide it in a carrier bag. Set and old alarm clock off in my pocket and fetch out the earpiece, screaming into it, “What do you mean H.G Wells, has gone out? That bloody Time machine he gave me, is crap. I set it to 2005 a.d, by mistake and I’m surrounded by a load of nutters dressed in silly jackets.”

What does your ‘ringtone’ say about you? That you are humble it does not. It is a status symbol now. I think we should upset people even more than we do, by adopting vile ringtones. Like, ‘The National Anthem’ ‘Countdown’ or a ‘Frank Skinner’ trying to sing.

What is this all about? The oddity of users who insist on having blazing rows at full volume? (Parodied for us by Dom Joly on ‘Trigger Happy TV) Why do they do that? To make themselves more mysterious, perhaps? Private conversations for all the world to hear. I think its some sort of sick cry for help. You know, you are on the tube on a Monday morning and just coming to terms with nursing a hangover. Your boss is on top of the office (in a sniper post) waiting to talk about your general disillusionment of the Industrial revolution. You have cut the roof of your mouth on some pre-sharpened toast, its ‘chucking it down’ and you forgot your umbrella. Suddenly, a noise emerges from a duffle bag, not belonging to any sane human being, and starts making sounds of an army of out of control unmanned electric wheelchairs trying to find candles in a hardware store during a power cut. A person with all the social skills of a paper cup proceeds to remonstrate with an equally irritating moron for the entire journey. You have this uncontrollable desire to snatch it off them and throw it from the train.

‘Missed call’? I would rather miss being suspended naked over a live volcano

They are not cool now because everyone has one. When they were more scarce I used to use the TV remote or an unwrapped bar of chocolate while driving. Fighting one handed with the wheel and mounting curbs occasionally. Until one hot day the chocolate melted everywhere and it looked like I had had a disappointing toilet experience before stopping my car.

The truth about uncouth youths

It’s no secret that children are targets for phone companies. Mobiles (cell phones) have accessories to make them more cool. Holsters in the shape of Disney characters. Stores even sell furry ‘clothes’ for them. For example: Does your mobile say to itself, “Important meeting today, I must impress our International clients with my new red trousers and purple feather boa?” Jazzy clip covers. New games and ringtones. It’s a billion dollar industry. Who pays for it? Parents, that’s who! The only way you can get your child to speak to you is to ‘top up their phone’ and then only from your landline.

The mobile can take digital pictures and video. It can surf the World Wide Web. It can provide an entertainment system. You can see who you are talking to from anywhere in the world. They are waterproof. They have alarms, reminders, diary, an address book, email. You name it.

“I don’t know where I would be without my phone.” You hear people say, as if they were in some sort of rapture about their closest relative. How about “being undisturbed”?

Forget aural sex.

The fact is you now have a means for any Harry, Dick and Tom to phone you up at the most awkward times to pester you about some trivial matter. Without your mobile you would be totally free. Completely free. No more aural oppression. Wear a mobile and you wear everybody’s demands upon you. As for people who answer phones in planes, hospitals, theatres and the cinema, they should have it shoved firmly up their bottoms and switched to ‘vibrate’. Well maybe not. It’s supposed to be a punishment.

If I am bothered by nuisance callers on my land-line phone I say, “Sure, I would love to buy pet insurance from you. Can I take your number first. Great, thank you. Just tell me, when do you generally take a shower?… Oh, 7am in the morning? OK I will call you back then.” On one occasion I told a double glazing salesman that I was not the householder and just a struggling cat burglar looking for a particular DVD.

Have you noticed? They are getting bigger again. No, not cat burglars, I mean mobile phones. A year ago they were so small you had to have X-Men vision to make a call or text someone. Now they are starting to grow again. The retro phone is coming back. My other friend has a ringtone that sounds like one of the old seventies ‘trimphones’. People and feathered species used to mimic the noise. Trimphones were hip then and they will be state of the art all over again. Everything has gone full circle.

Imagine wearing one of those ‘babies’ in a holster. You could walk up to other less trendy phone owners and pretend you are “Dirty Harry”, epitomised on Ricky Gervais’ ‘The Office’ Brit sitcom. Just point your phone and say, Clint Eastwood style ….

“I know what you’re thinking…. Did I make five or six calls??? Are you feeling lucky? Go ahead punk…Make my day.”

At the rate of ever-changing mobile phone fashion I can’t wait to go back to using smoke signals.

If you are worried about your child’s mobile phone use or any of the issues mentioned in this article, click below, or just go down the pub to take your mind off it.

All content on this site is subject to copyright © 2000/2006If you wish to use anything either text or graphics please ask permission

All content on this site is subject to copyright © 2000/2006
If you wish to use anything either text or graphics please ask permission