When a mobile phone just meant having a long flex

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There was an actress on the phone in an old movie recently – a real old phone where the height of sophistication was to have a flex long enough to allow you to take the call into the next room.

Those who grew up in this age of the mobile couldn’t possibly understand how impressive that would be.

For most of us, presuming you even had a house phone in the first place, there was a coiled lead that meant you couldn’t get further than three feet from the phone – ruling out any possibility of a private conversation.

The alternative was a public phone box – now as commonplace as hen’s teeth – whereby two tuppences and a quick press of Button A brought you as much privacy as a glass box on the side of the street can afford you.

Of course if you were wise to the ways of the world, you didn’t even need two tuppences; there was a way of tapping out the number so that you could get through for free.

Back in the day before not alone every house had a phone but every child over the age of six has one, access to a landline was not a given – so Christmas time would see a scatter of relatives here gather to ring an equally animated bunch on the other side of the Atlantic to wish them, one by one, the felicitations of the season.

This could take quite some time because everyone at this end had to talk to everyone at the other end, which meant a sort of mathematical equation that made coming the lotto numbers a piece of cake by comparison.

The mobile solved all of that of course because now you can talk to anyone, anytime, from almost anywhere you like.

It wasn’t instantaneous of course because even if you didn’t own one, you will remember the original mobiles – the ones the size of a brick with a price the size of a television.

In hindsight, big was beautiful because if you could afford one of these technical miracles, you wanted the whole world to know it.

Remember the yuppies at the bar talking loudly into something the size of a small suitcase, when the only message they really wanted to convey was a simple one….just look at me?

But then again, there would have been little point in spending a small fortune on something so subtle that not everyone in eye and earshot could see and hear.

They were supposed to fit in your pocket but the protruding aerial meant that if you did put them in your jacket it would take your eye out – and if you tried to fit them into your trousers, they could instantly signal the end of your prospects of having children.

Gradually of course, they became smaller and more powerful, to the point whereby you wouldn’t know if you even had one on your person.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.