Mobile phones are sort of like Tim Tams – for years civilisation did fine in their absence, but then the word got out and now we can’t imagine life without them. I remember the old mobile phones that you had to carry along with a large bag containing the battery and the curly cord that connected the phone to the battery pack. They were primarily a business device and not one that ordinary people would want, or feel a need for. I also remember that when mobile phones became available to the public, Telecom advertised the phone rates - similar to the long distance call rates, even if you were calling a few kilometres away. There was the shock realisation that people ringing a mobile phone would even have to pay those rates, not just the mobile phone holder. What a rip-off! I thought. Who would ever agree to such mercenary prices?! (You have to remember this the same person who thought CDs would never catch on because of their inflated prices compared to cassettes or vinyl records.)

But mobile phones truly are expensive and even now I hate the idea of people who are only contactable via a mobile phone, and don’t supply a landline number for you to call them on. I baulk at the way the phone companies have us over a barrel and continually bleed money out of us, whether for making calls, having a phone on our shelf, using message bank or for even looking up a number on directory assistance. 

My husband is even more stingy about spending money on phone calls and will prefer to call a neighbour on the two-way radio before lifting the receiver to make a call. This works fine as long as the conversation is fairly innocuous and you don’t really care if anyone within 40km or so can listen in. But when the other party starts to say, “So, what happened about that weird rash of yours? You know, the one you said you had on your-” it’s time to put the radio handset down and talk one-on-one.

One of the weird things about the high use of mobile phones is the adoption of ‘txt msgs’ into our vernacular. In addition to annoying American signage that has infiltrated our culture with words like “Drive Thru” and “donuts”, text messaging has condensed and perverted our use of the English language. What really drives me crazy is when people send me a message and abbreviate everything despite having lots of room to leave the message in full. Let’s say your phone allows you to have 200 characters in one message, there is no need to say, “OK CU ltr”. Please, for the sake of my brain that has spent 40 years learning English: please, please, please! use the words “Okay, see you later”.

I must admit I am a bit of a grammar freak on my phone and I try to spell and punctuate properly in messages that I send. I am quite annoyed at the fact that I can’t seem to find brackets to really add to my sentence structuring. But when I get to the end of a message and find it has spilled over into 2 messages, my cheap freak takes control and the grammar freak has to make way. So then I have to go back and try to condense things, cringing at being forced to replace the word ‘to’ with the number 2, all to save 25 cents. It is a burden I begrudgingly shoulder, in order to save money.

Another character I can’t seem to find is the ampersand (&) so if I need to key in the phrase ‘trash and treasure’, to condense it I make ‘trash n treasure’, but I really want to correct it by putting in apostrophes so it reads ‘trash ‘n’ treasure’… but of course, that just keeps the tally the same as the original.  That makes me as always, gaze off into space and ponder why ‘abbreviation’ is such a long word, and why ‘dyslexia’ is so hard to spell.

I find sending (and receiving) text messages the ultimate impersonal way of communicating. It seems many people find it so easy to send a clinically short message to someone and then feel satisfied that they have done a good job of conveying a thought. Back in the ‘olden days’ I remember when people would come over and sit down for a good yarn. Have a cuppa, stretch the feet out under the kitchen table and catch up on the news. (Okay, okay, we still do that, but for the sake of illustration, bear with me.) 

Let’s say your neighbour has had an unfortunate incident that involved your dog running out onto the road as the neighbour was driving past, and now little Fido is facing doggie heaven. In this case, the neighbour would come and sit down, ask about the weather, your health, the farm, the kids and compliment your flowering peaches. Perhaps they might share a recipe for a peach flan and marvel at the different ways you can make shortcrust pastry. Then once the conversation dwindles down to a few non-descript sighs, then the bad news would be gently broken. The neighbour might even offer to help dig a hole for Fido, and when they leave, the tragedy of losing the family pet is softened by the fact that now you have a tasty peach flan recipe to try out.

Of course, in the alternative scenario, there’d be no friendly visit but a text message sent to your phone that reads, “Sry ran ovr yr dog”. And to make matters worse, being in the bush, you wouldn’t get that message until two days later when you drive into town and turn your phone on - after two nights of calling out, searching and agonising over the disappearance of the beloved animal. Then to make things even worserer, you discover the neighbours have disposed of the dog down the gully for the wild animals to munch on. And when you challenge them on this issue, they say, “Well, I told you about this days ago – didn’t you get the message? We thought if you wanted the body to bury, you’d have told us.”

But that’s just an example.

You might think that I am violently opposed to mobile phones and using text messages. That is not so; I can see there are perfectly good situations where sending text messages would be discrete and effective. Like if you accidentally stumble upon an Amway convention while wandering lost in a large shopping centre, and have been trapped in the corner by a recruitment officer. Too scared to risk their ire if you say something offensive, you can send a text message to your friend or spouse along the lines of: “GET ME OUT OF HERE!! And by the way, Woolies has dough-nuts on special – shall we get some?” 

But then people can go overboard and text in situations where any sane person would use a more direct way of communicating. Like last week my daughter was standing near a building and a friend of hers, just around the corner, a mere 15 metres away, sent her a message saying, “Come and play handball”. His excuse was he couldn’t be bothered to walk around and ask her personally. Ah, to have such youthful vigour!

There might be other, more crucial circumstances where the use of a text message would be worthless to the user. Like, perhaps you are walking along a path on a cliff admiring the view, when a freak gust of wind causes you to wobble, and lose your balance. All of a sudden, you are teetering over the edge of the cliff and as you fall, you manage to grab an overhanging branch of a fig tree, growing fortuitously at that very spot. So there you are, quite surprised and just a teensy bit terrified, swaying in mid-air. How to get out of this predicament?

The text message-dependant generation may immediately think of their phone and how to get it out of their pocket. So if you are one of those, you marvel at the fact you happen to have your phone in the chest pocket of your shirt. And luckily you haven’t buttoned the flap over the top of the pocket, even though your mother always says it looks untidy not to. So with your teeth, you are able to slide your phone out of your pocket and now there you have your method of salvation. Now what? Okay, a bit hard to type in a text message, but you know you want to, because that is what you always do. With a bit of heavy shaking, you can flick the boots off your feet. Then you scrunch up your toes within the sock on your left foot, and grab the sock off your right foot, and then likewise free your foot from your other sock. Luckily (in a particularly uncanny chain of chance events) you have done yoga since you were little, so while hanging off the branch, you can lift up your leg and flip open the phone with your toes, and start to tap in a message of distress. What a stroke of luck! But somehow the phone service is not responding and the message stays in the ‘outbox’. Oh dear, how on earth can this be fixed?? A little voice comes into your head, a calm voice of reason: Forget the phone, dummy! Shout for help, so those people sitting on the beach below will hear.

Oh, okay – yeah, that will work. 

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