30 July 2015
Communication the modern way; how to really get in touch.
by Lynda Goetz
When I went out the other day, carrying my mobile (as usual), it sprang into life (as usual) as I left the village. It seemed that a number of people had been trying to get in touch. Where I live, my mobile – smart as it is – cannot really do the one thing for which it was originally invented, namely send and receive phone calls. This is because I live in the countryside; not only do I not get superfast broadband (and look unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future), but I also do not get much of a mobile signal. Occasionally, on a good day with the right weather conditions, I can get a signal if I stand on one leg in one corner of my dressing room (slight exaggeration, but you get the picture). My daughters, on a different network, can sometimes get a signal in one of the bathrooms. This situation is not entirely satisfactory as far as modern life goes, but we are quite used to it. We tend to use an old-fashioned thing called a landline – which does a surprisingly good job if you actually want to talk to people – rather than email or text them, that is. However, I find that my city-based friends, acquaintances and business contacts seem not really to understand that such a situation could exist in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Go back some thirty five years and I was living in a rather cool flat (well, I thought so at the time) in Bloomsbury. I was there courtesy of some American friends I had met in Spain, who had the use of it from a friend of theirs who was living in New York (keep up at the back there) but who had kept the lease going as it was basically too good a thing to let go (I think eventually he was paid good money to ‘leave’). Anyway, part of the deal was that I would move out in the summer and find somewhere else to rest my head for a while should any of them wish to come to London. Reasonable notice was expected to be given. I came home from work one day to find a man I had never set eyes on before in ‘my’ flat; apparently he had been ‘ringing and ringing’ to tell me of his arrival. I was incredulous. Had he never heard of Royal Mail and its American equivalent, United States Postal Service (USPS)? Clearly writing a letter had simply never occurred to him. I had not answered his calls, so I must have been out of the country or possibly dead. The fact that I had been at work during the week, with friends in the evenings and away at the weekends seems not to have entered his head.
Nowadays very few people write letters (although I have noticed a rather interesting development amongst some of the young who appear to have decided that writing letters is so out of date as to be the latest thing). Emails seem to have been superseded by Facebook messaging in many instances, and texting or Whatsapp seem to have replaced ‘giving someone a ring’. If you do ring someone it is far more likely to be on their mobile than on a landline, which many people do not even have these days. However, should you be trying to ask someone how to get to their house and your other indispensable piece of modern technology (namely the SatNav) is not working, then what to do if they do not answer their mobile and it has not occurred to you to use their landline? Well, as I explained to my new friends from London who were trying to visit us on their way home from holiday, you could simply have asked the couple who run the village shop. They could have told you immediately AND given you directions.
