Now See Here, Young Man!

The first mobile telephone call was made on 17 June 1946 from a car in the USA.  This was followed by the world's first partially automatic car phone system in 1956, which weighed about 40 kilograms and was made up of vacuum tubes and relays.  The first call on a handheld mobile was demonstrated by John F Mitchell and Dr Martin Cooper in 1973.  The phone it was placed from weighed about one kilogram and retailed at $3,995.00.  The first commercially available mobile phone was released in 1983.  It was in high demand, despite the weight, the low talk time and the shocking battery life.

My mobile phone, which dates from shortly after that time, is useful for holding the dining room door open during dinner parties so that Jenkins can dart through to the kitchen for the next pot of mulled wine without fiddling with door knobs.

Which is probably why I now need to replace it (people kept forever kicking it out of the way by accident, splashing mulled wine over it and generally defeating the purpose).  That, and the local quack says I need to stop hoisting the battery pack around on my shoulder.  My spine is getting crooked.

So, I leave my 'brick' as a doorstop and venture into the bewildering world of the mobile phone market.

I'm currently on a network that has the best rural coverage in Scotland, which means I'm able to ring up the kind folk at the Ambulance Service when Henry's had a little stroll and forgot about the Laws of Physics, and it has now launched 4G.

This makes navigating their website a bit trickier all of a sudden.  I love shopping on the internet.  The Land Rover is not what it used to be, and needs a full service each time we take it out anywhere beyond the bounds of the estate, whereas the delivery man and the postman normally have either a lovely road-legal and MOT up-to-date van, or a bicycle with properly inflated tyres.

However, with the launch of the new 4G network (jolly good technological progress, etc, etc, I'm sure) the website is trying jam their new 4G-ready smartphones down my throat and I was having a hard time finding out which phone would actually suit me and my 'lifestyle'.

So, I decided to go into the nearest shop, in hopes that good old human interactions would solve my problem.

I suppose, in a way it did.

I went in, with strong ideas about what sort of phone I wanted, and I was determined not to be swayed from them.  I was immediately noticed by a cocksure young male employee who sauntered over to me, knowing that he would get a sale no matter what, and was confident he could flog me the most expensive one.

'Now see here…' I started.

'You need a new phone,' he interrupted.

Then he pounced.  Not literally, of course.  That would have been unseemly, but he quickly ushered me over to the new 4G smartphones.

I saw phones labelled after planetary groupings, phones made by pieces of fruit and others named after fruit, ones that forget to use an 'e' before an 'x' and those whose namesakes were places in America.  They were either 'Bold' or 'Black' or 'White' or 'Note', curvy or followed by words in which people missed out the 'o', or followed by just plain numbers.

This was not the world as it was when I first bought my mobile phone.  Suddenly, I missed it terribly.

It came down to two models in the end, both with 'touchscreens' (luckily, I normally wear fingerless gloves about the estate – better grip on the shotgun) and both 4G 'ready' (I can remember when one G was disputed, and now there's apparently four of them).  I told the young man that I would think about it over lunch and come back in the afternoon, having made a decision.

On my way to a nearby tearoom, it came to my attention that smartphones might be able to do almost anything these days, but their users still cannot.

I bumped into countless people who were all obsessively interacting with their smartphones, tapping away at the screen, or browsing the internet, or even playing games and watching videos.  They swerve all over the pavement.  They don't look where they are going.  They walk at a pace slower than a snail's.  They hang about in social groups, but only speak through their smartphones.  Sometimes, they even just stop walking, in the middle of the pavement, and act all affronted when you walk into them from behind.  Well, how the dickens did I know you were going to stop right there in a pedestrian walkway?

Then, I stopped dead (and was, rather ironically, bumped into by a smartphone user, not looking ahead, but at their phone screen).  I turned right around and headed back into the shop.  The tearoom could wait.

I bore down on the young man who’d served me earlier, ignoring his swagger as it turned to fear.

'Now see here, young man!  I need a mobile phone.  I don't need a smartphone.  I want a phone that I can pay for monthly by contract without faffing about with "top-ups", but only about my usual pay-as-you-go rate of ten of your British pounds.  That has the ability to make calls, to send a text and to live more than a few hours on its battery.  And by God, I want it now.'

After an initial moment of shock, the young man led to me to a phone that was more my style.  It was still a mobile phone.  The screen didn't need touching.  The buttons were physical and made a small click noise when you pressed them.  It didn't come with a stylus.  It didn't even have blue teeth.  Although, it did have FM radio, which makes it rather swish in my view.

I walked out that place with my head held high, dignity and freewill intact.  I could choose to ignore my phone.  I could choose to walk properly, look where I'm going and not get 'Gaming/Texting Thumb'.  

Most importantly, I owned a phone that was not smarter than me.