Staying on the right side of a mobile friend and foe

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Much and all as people of my generation curse them, ‘the mobile’, for better or worse, is now all part of our daily lives. It really is like walking around with an electronic tag as if push came to shove, you can be located pretty much anywhere in the world, once the phone is in your pocket.

I’m still struggling a tad to come to terms with some complete stranger managing to make contact with me inside by trousers’ pocket but maybe like the television programmes that we don’t want to see, there is always the option of the off button.

At times there is a sense of freedom, and of the shackles being thrown off, when the mobile is inadvertently left behind in a car, tractor or van while the regular changing of jackets means that there are times during the day I’m left ‘mobileless’.

On these occasions there’s nearly always repercussions. From those closest there’s nearly always the accusatory question of: “Why won’t you answer your mobile?” There’s also the horror of missing a call from a neighbour after the cattle have broken into the meadow earlier that morning.

You really are ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ in relation to instant access for those in the world that you can tolerate, and the rest of the population that you might be as well pleased if they never dialled your number.

Martin Cooper of the Motorola Communications Corporation is credited with being the man who first made a mobile call on an ugly and cumbersome brute of a hand piece, as big as a building brick . . . and that was way back in 1973 on the streets of New York.

In the words of many ould fashioned codgers like myself, even a decade or two later, we believed that it would never catch on . . . to be forever consigned into the world of gimmickry, where ‘smarties’ waste their time inventing things that people will never use.

Well, catch on it did, through the 1980s and 1990s with mass production making the devices a lot more affordable  than the early asking prices of around one thousand punts (remember those things, alas consigned to the archaic library for many years), although the costs have now gone almost full circle again due to technology innovations.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.