Humour #1.
Non-etiquette and the mobile phone
by
Robert L Fielding
I have recently been observing people using their mobile telephones. The uses these ubiquitous machines are put to are many, ranging from the out and out emergency:-
Caller A: The patient requires two litres of Rhesus negative immediately. Can you deliver?
On down the line, through less urgent matters:-
Caller B: Mavis, I've run out of petrol, can you get our Pete to come for me. I'm at the crossroads of bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz blasted machine.
To: Caller C: Joe, can you put me a fiver each way on on L'escargot in the 2.30 at Chester?
And: Caller D: Fred, I've changed me mind, I'll have cod and chips instead.
These are what I shall designate Type 1 calls, having some purpose and reason for using the machine at one's hip.
The vast majority of uses that the cellular phone is put to come under Type 2 'uses', of which the following are typical examples:
Caller E: Hiya, what you doin'?
Me, I'm just waitin' for me bus.
Or:- Caller F: Hey, just thought I'd call and see what you're doing.
Yeah, my flight leaves in half an hour.
And: Caller G: Is that you, what're you up to?
Nothing much, everything's quiet as usual. What's it like your end?
You will notice that the calls made by E, F, and G are basically the same. In all three cases time is slack, there's nothing much to do but hang about and wait. However, in the case of Caller F, as the flight mentioned is scheduled at 2.30am, one wonders who is being spoken to. Is it another passenger in another departure lounge. If not, who phones somebody at two in the morning for the fun of it?
Caller G is actually a nightwatchman at a DIY wharehouse just off the London Orbital. Again, the call is surely to an aquaintance who works similar hours.
Phoning one's loved ones in the small hours seems an extravagance most could well do without.
Type 3 uses are purely for the vain. Since the mobile phone is in its infancy, not everyone possesses one. They are still quite expensive. Having a credit card helps, but even today, not everybody has one of those either. Those crackpots, who, like me, prefer to use cash rather than plastic are marginalised in today's society, are asked to give some other form of identification, with an address before their crinkly tenners are accepted for something like car-hire.
Examples of Type 3 uses are as follows. You will note that the caller has no reason whatsoever for calling, other than to display to those around that the user has one.
Caller H: Hi, Julie. Guess who?
This is the only example I can think of at the moment. This type of call is so inane that it is practically impossible to invent one off the cuff, as it were. You will hear them everywhere, and at any time. Remembering their substance however, is quite a different matter, probably because there is no substance to this type of call.
So much for the callers. Now let's take a look at the people getting a call on their little pocket thingymajigs. With the normal house telephone, situated usually in the hall, with an extension in the bedroom for night calls, when the phone rang, the owner had to repair to where the phone was situated to receive the call. Admittedly, this caused inconvenience to the person being phoned. A ringing phone at such times as the 90th minute of the 1999 European Cup Final between Manchester United and Bayern Munich would have caused uproar.
However, as the very last thing any one of those people at all interested in the outcome of that match would do at that precise minute would be to call someone on the telephone, the chance of such a horrendous thing occurring would be minimal. Even the wives, and particularly the wives of those men interested in any football match of any kind between any teams knows better than to disturb their menfolk in the middle of a crucial game with such trivial information as the fact that they would prefer cod to haddock with their chips.
Yes, the conventional telephone had its problems, but they are as nothing to the inconveniences caused by the mobile phone to one and all.
On the train, they are a positive nuisance. Before their invention, one could more or less guarantee a quiet journey back up north from the metropolis, particularly if there was only one other person in the same carriage. Now, the chances of getting a phone free carriage are practically nil. One is forced to endure half a conversation one has no business to hear in the first place, and this occurs with such amazing regularity between London Euston and Manchester Piccadilly that one is left wondering if every one of that person's aquaintances has not thought fit to talk to their friend lest he be bored with his 2 hour and 40 minute journey northward.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the people surrounding the mobile phone owner, a call can occur at any time, and frequently does. I well remember sitting listening to a rendering of Tchaikovsky's magnificent 5th Symphony in the Free Trade Hall on Peter Street in Manchester, when, just as the Halle were giving their usual tour de force version of the tremendous last movement, precisely at the point where the great man, with considerable invention places a bar of silence before the triumphant finale begins, someone's blasted phone sprang up to fill the long awaited pause in the music. The effect was catastrophic. It undermined the whole effect completely, disturbed the audience's concentration, and nearly threw the new conductor off balance. Fortunately, Stan the Man, as we Mancunians not used to the nuances of Polish spelling and pronunciation are wont to call our resident conductor, never missed a beat, and we all got to the end together, that time. Nevertheless, the intrusion of the ringing tone of the mobile phone, which can be anything from the memorable bits of the end of Beethoven's Ninth, or an abridged 'Oh we do like to be beside the seaside', can and very often do interrupt matters of greater import at the other end.
One can only be thankful that such people as brain surgeons and policemen on point duty turn their appliances off before commencing their arduous duties.
Lesser mortals have to put up with the intruding jingle during the final stages of poetry readings in cafes, and during the painful extraction of eye teeth, when one's molar nerves are left to jangle until the vagaries of the 9.30 to Amsterdam have been fully explained.
It only remains to idly conjecture how some of the more notable events of history would have turned out had their been mobile phones to ring out and chime in.
Presumably General George Custer would have had recourse to use his in a Type 1 use at a certain point in his last stand. The Emperor Napoleon would have been able to communicate his now famous palindrome to someone of his aquaintance, but on the phone would probably have said, "I was OK before I had seen Elba", leaving the interlocutor to fathom out the riddle for future generations.
At Munich, at the eve of World War 2, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would have only told his good lady wife that he had in his hand a piece of paper, as a suitable reply to the question, "What're you doing, lovey?", which, you will recall is a Type 2 use of the mobile phone. Indeed, the world and Chamberlain would have been spared the embarrassment, and Hitler would presumably not have thought of us as the pushover he wrongly imagined us Brits to be. Hostilities would have been avoided, Churchill would have spent an eternity in the 'wilderness years', and we would not have such phrases as "We will fight them on the beaches etc etc" to tell to our grandchildren.
The world indeed, would have been a much poorer place had the invention been earlier than it eventually was.
For the future, we are assured that we need not be inconvenienced at the eleventh hour, or indeed at the ninetieth minute by the insistant persistance of the conventionally placed non mobile phone, and nor will we have to leave the place in which a supremely important event is being televised live, such as the opening of parliament, or a party political broadcast.
Robert L. Fielding
by
Robert L Fielding
I have recently been observing people using their mobile telephones. The uses these ubiquitous machines are put to are many, ranging from the out and out emergency:-
Caller A: The patient requires two litres of Rhesus negative immediately. Can you deliver?
On down the line, through less urgent matters:-
Caller B: Mavis, I've run out of petrol, can you get our Pete to come for me. I'm at the crossroads of bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz blasted machine.
To: Caller C: Joe, can you put me a fiver each way on on L'escargot in the 2.30 at Chester?
And: Caller D: Fred, I've changed me mind, I'll have cod and chips instead.
These are what I shall designate Type 1 calls, having some purpose and reason for using the machine at one's hip.
The vast majority of uses that the cellular phone is put to come under Type 2 'uses', of which the following are typical examples:
Caller E: Hiya, what you doin'?
Me, I'm just waitin' for me bus.
Or:- Caller F: Hey, just thought I'd call and see what you're doing.
Yeah, my flight leaves in half an hour.
And: Caller G: Is that you, what're you up to?
Nothing much, everything's quiet as usual. What's it like your end?
You will notice that the calls made by E, F, and G are basically the same. In all three cases time is slack, there's nothing much to do but hang about and wait. However, in the case of Caller F, as the flight mentioned is scheduled at 2.30am, one wonders who is being spoken to. Is it another passenger in another departure lounge. If not, who phones somebody at two in the morning for the fun of it?
Caller G is actually a nightwatchman at a DIY wharehouse just off the London Orbital. Again, the call is surely to an aquaintance who works similar hours.
Phoning one's loved ones in the small hours seems an extravagance most could well do without.
Type 3 uses are purely for the vain. Since the mobile phone is in its infancy, not everyone possesses one. They are still quite expensive. Having a credit card helps, but even today, not everybody has one of those either. Those crackpots, who, like me, prefer to use cash rather than plastic are marginalised in today's society, are asked to give some other form of identification, with an address before their crinkly tenners are accepted for something like car-hire.
Examples of Type 3 uses are as follows. You will note that the caller has no reason whatsoever for calling, other than to display to those around that the user has one.
Caller H: Hi, Julie. Guess who?
This is the only example I can think of at the moment. This type of call is so inane that it is practically impossible to invent one off the cuff, as it were. You will hear them everywhere, and at any time. Remembering their substance however, is quite a different matter, probably because there is no substance to this type of call.
So much for the callers. Now let's take a look at the people getting a call on their little pocket thingymajigs. With the normal house telephone, situated usually in the hall, with an extension in the bedroom for night calls, when the phone rang, the owner had to repair to where the phone was situated to receive the call. Admittedly, this caused inconvenience to the person being phoned. A ringing phone at such times as the 90th minute of the 1999 European Cup Final between Manchester United and Bayern Munich would have caused uproar.
However, as the very last thing any one of those people at all interested in the outcome of that match would do at that precise minute would be to call someone on the telephone, the chance of such a horrendous thing occurring would be minimal. Even the wives, and particularly the wives of those men interested in any football match of any kind between any teams knows better than to disturb their menfolk in the middle of a crucial game with such trivial information as the fact that they would prefer cod to haddock with their chips.
Yes, the conventional telephone had its problems, but they are as nothing to the inconveniences caused by the mobile phone to one and all.
On the train, they are a positive nuisance. Before their invention, one could more or less guarantee a quiet journey back up north from the metropolis, particularly if there was only one other person in the same carriage. Now, the chances of getting a phone free carriage are practically nil. One is forced to endure half a conversation one has no business to hear in the first place, and this occurs with such amazing regularity between London Euston and Manchester Piccadilly that one is left wondering if every one of that person's aquaintances has not thought fit to talk to their friend lest he be bored with his 2 hour and 40 minute journey northward.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the people surrounding the mobile phone owner, a call can occur at any time, and frequently does. I well remember sitting listening to a rendering of Tchaikovsky's magnificent 5th Symphony in the Free Trade Hall on Peter Street in Manchester, when, just as the Halle were giving their usual tour de force version of the tremendous last movement, precisely at the point where the great man, with considerable invention places a bar of silence before the triumphant finale begins, someone's blasted phone sprang up to fill the long awaited pause in the music. The effect was catastrophic. It undermined the whole effect completely, disturbed the audience's concentration, and nearly threw the new conductor off balance. Fortunately, Stan the Man, as we Mancunians not used to the nuances of Polish spelling and pronunciation are wont to call our resident conductor, never missed a beat, and we all got to the end together, that time. Nevertheless, the intrusion of the ringing tone of the mobile phone, which can be anything from the memorable bits of the end of Beethoven's Ninth, or an abridged 'Oh we do like to be beside the seaside', can and very often do interrupt matters of greater import at the other end.
One can only be thankful that such people as brain surgeons and policemen on point duty turn their appliances off before commencing their arduous duties.
Lesser mortals have to put up with the intruding jingle during the final stages of poetry readings in cafes, and during the painful extraction of eye teeth, when one's molar nerves are left to jangle until the vagaries of the 9.30 to Amsterdam have been fully explained.
It only remains to idly conjecture how some of the more notable events of history would have turned out had their been mobile phones to ring out and chime in.
Presumably General George Custer would have had recourse to use his in a Type 1 use at a certain point in his last stand. The Emperor Napoleon would have been able to communicate his now famous palindrome to someone of his aquaintance, but on the phone would probably have said, "I was OK before I had seen Elba", leaving the interlocutor to fathom out the riddle for future generations.
At Munich, at the eve of World War 2, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would have only told his good lady wife that he had in his hand a piece of paper, as a suitable reply to the question, "What're you doing, lovey?", which, you will recall is a Type 2 use of the mobile phone. Indeed, the world and Chamberlain would have been spared the embarrassment, and Hitler would presumably not have thought of us as the pushover he wrongly imagined us Brits to be. Hostilities would have been avoided, Churchill would have spent an eternity in the 'wilderness years', and we would not have such phrases as "We will fight them on the beaches etc etc" to tell to our grandchildren.
The world indeed, would have been a much poorer place had the invention been earlier than it eventually was.
For the future, we are assured that we need not be inconvenienced at the eleventh hour, or indeed at the ninetieth minute by the insistant persistance of the conventionally placed non mobile phone, and nor will we have to leave the place in which a supremely important event is being televised live, such as the opening of parliament, or a party political broadcast.
Robert L. Fielding
posted by Justice at 2:03 AM
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