A tale of the telephone

There is probably some new-fangled word magicked into existence to describe the condition of those who have developed an intense aversion to the mobile telephone. I don't know what it is, but I fear that it may soon be applied to me.

My first mobile phone was one of those clunky devices with a weedy pull out arial. It was only ever of limited use here in Norfolk, reliably refusing to connect to the network whenever I needed it most. It was expensive, and callers always sounded as if they were talking from inside a dustbin.

Mobiles got better, smaller, and cheaper, and soon the world seemed awash with people sporting extraneous growths from their ears, or who walked around staring intently at handsets toted about like little religious icons, while their fingers expertly and feverishly tapped out text messages.

It became impossible to go into a town centre without seeing groups of tracksuited youths yelling into their mobiles or poking away at the keys, and occasionally shouting something about being "outta credit". As soon as you took your place on a train the symphony of beeps started up, the invariable lyric to which seemed to be "I'm on the train!". Mobile phone afficionados lurked in supermarkets (for some reason always women in their 30's), communicating with somebody about something (or, more likely, nothing) while wheeling trollies and occasionally cuffing attention-starved kids.

To paraphrase Churchill, never in the field of human communication have so many had so little of importance to say to so many others.

I became terrified of giving my mobile number out, as so many of those receiving it immediately subjected me to a hailstorm of texted jokes (a phenomena that seems to repeat whenever anybody gets my email address), and inconsequential calls at all hours of the day and night. And so I took to leaving it switched off, carrying it silent and tame in my handbag purely for emergencies.

When I met my partner I also met an advanced mobilephobe. As we had met over the internet, our first cautious "meeting" away from the keyboard was by landline. We began our conversation in that nervous, hesitant way one does with strangers, and agreed that we disliked talking over the telephone.

Three hours later, we were still agreeing that we disliked talking over the telephone, and were particularly averse to the mobile phone. That first week we clocked up an average of two hours a night, and by the end of it our mobiles were permanently turned on and melting in our hands from overuse.

After our first date there was no stopping us. She living at one end of Norfolk and I at the other, the landline telephone substituted during those dateless weekday nights, and the mobile during breaks at work. Our record was five hours in a call that ended only because neither of us had eaten since coming home from work and the hunger pangs became overwhelming some time after midnight.

Our telephone bills, landline and mobile, would have made a Rothschild wince.

After a decent seven month period of courtship we moved in together, obviating the need for marathon telephone calls. A work transfer for me to be closer to my new home brought a changed working pattern, and our breaks no longer coincided. Our telephones fell silent, and we reverted to our former phobic condititon.

My partner is always happiest communicating by keyboard. An internet citizen in the truest sense, she would rather spend an hour composing an email than spend five minutes on the telephone. She even emails me, and I use the same computer!

Where is all this leading?

Well, I take the view that the telephone, especially the mobile telephone, is nothing more than a handy tool, like a hammer. If I want to put a picture up, I'll take the hammer out of the drawer, tap the nail into the wall, and put the hammer back in its proper place. I've never felt impelled to walk around with the hammer, to take it on trains or into the supermarket.

One thing I never did was to give my employers my mobile number, having observed that those who did made themselves eminently findable, and if you can be found you can be bothered.

On television at the moment there's an advert running which purports to show how much free time can be reclaimed from work when one is equipped with mobile communications. This is a preposterous lie. What actually happens is that work is provided with the means to intrude into your free time, and if it can, it will.

My job takes me to our various outposts all over Norfolk and north Suffolk. It's never been a problem. I leave the Norwich office, get in my car and travel to, say, Cromer, do what I have to do, and return to Norwich to deal with whatever has turned up on my desk there. What could be simpler?

A few weeks back the "efficiency experts" sent in to examine our working practices decreed that those in similar jobs to myself could expedite our tasks to better effect if we were equipped with mobile communications, which in our case means a mobile telephone and a wireless notebook computer. Personally, I think "efficiency" too readily translates as "control", but that's another post.

The upshot is that I am barely out of the office before some superior is calling the mobile demanding now information that is either of no importance or simply not urgent, and could easily wait until I return to my desk. What is most annoying are the calls demanding to know exactly where I am. And it goes on every few minutes, forcing me to pull off the road or interupting what I'm doing at the office I'm visiting, pointlessly taking huge bites out of the working day.

Initially complying with numerous exhortations that the mobile should be left switched on after office hours, I quickly found that many of my superiors have no conception of "free time", and seemed to believe that we should be available 24/7. They also believed that the spanking new notebooks could be deployed as a lever to break into our private time: "Ah, yes, Marion: you can type up that report for me tonight and email it so I have it first thing."

I don't frequently swear, but it was tempting to advise the boss who uttered those words to go forth and copulate.

Now I make a great show at five o'clock every working day of ostentatiously switching off the mobile, strapping the notebook into its case, and locking both in my desk. Then it's away to home to enjoy those little bits of life that are available to us between working hours.

And to catch up on any email the person I've just spent ten minutes embracing may have sent me.