My smart phone for a tickey box

2011-09-27 11:00

I can watch TV on my cellphone. I can look at the stars without actually having to look at the stars. I can check my e-mail, order fast food and speak to my family overseas at reasonably agreeable rates (depending on which app I use). I can play Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man. I can even fly a remote control plane with it. But there’s one thing it doesn’t give me.

For all its sleek technological advances and ability to provide me with instant highlights of missed sporting fixtures, my phone lacks the mystery and romance of those old living-room clunkers that used to send you to the ceiling if it happened to ring – always at max volume – as you walked past.

Yes, convenience, life-changing, instant, business necessity and so on are buzzwords that make the modern handset a seeming must have to even the Chappies and Fizz Pop hawker on the street corner. But cellphones will never give you that surge of excitement and the sense of wonder (not to mention ghastly fright) you used to feel when charging towards the shrill ringing of the household telephone.

In my grandparent’s old house the phone in the lounge would give a slight, nervous hiccup before bursting into life like a resuscitated heart-attack victim with an incoming call. This pre-emptive ring was always the signal for me, or my brother (but most often both of us) to charge down the hall in an effort to be the first to greet the caller.

What a footrace it was. Doors charged down, dithering great-grandparents flattened, toes stubbed into walls: all so we could answer a phone, that at least 97 percent of the time, was some old duck calling to check my gran’s golf scores.

The 20m telephone sprint

There was a second phone in the bedroom, so if we were in the kitchen or outside, the scramble to answer would increase in drama with the two of us racing through the kitchen, then peeling off in different directions like ace fighter pilots honing in on a target.

These speedy answering tactics became even more important around high school where there was the odd chance that a girl may call. To stave off embarrassment it was essential to answer the phone before grandparents and visiting aunts or uncles (who had a habit of revealing your inadequacies telephonically to female admirers).

It didn’t happen often, but if my uncle Thomas answered the phone and the caller happened to be a girl looking for me, I would feign complete and utter ignorance at the mention of her name, pack my belongings and leave the country, such was the fiercely hot awkwardness that occurred after he’d announced to the entire household that David was now on the phone to his girlfriend.

There’s nothing closer to the experience of dying on stage than trying to have a teenage conversation with your parents, aunt, uncle and grandparents pretending not to listen. Now, of course, inept moments in young romance are replaced by the ease of the text message (or more immediate still, your preferred instant messenger service): cnt tk fam all hear. Wl txt l8a. lv u. Lol ?.

Tickey Box talk

Varsity produced even more opportunity for bumbling, cringe worthy telephonic moments. I badgered my dad for a cellphone back then, but for one blissful year I had to rely on the tickey box phone, obviously placed within earshot of everyone in the residence common room, to stay in touch with my girlfriend.

I don’t think anything in that year of 50c, R1 and R2 hunting and gathering was as thrilling as hearing the initial crackle of the ancient residence intercom system. You could sense that everyone in their rooms stopped doing what they were doing in the hope that it was their name to be called out. Invariably, after the warning crackle, the intercom would buzz to life only to produce a name so garbled all you could make out was ‘garble garble’, followed by a ridiculously crisp and over-enunciated ‘phone call downstairs’.

With that, 20 kids would rush to a packed common room all believing the call to be for them. So it wasn’t uncommon to finally get into the phone booth to discover that Neil from across the passage had been chatting up your one true love for the past 20 minutes.

Of course, once inside and desperately feeding the hungry callbox your collection of silvers, you had to endure mocking “ooooh” noises from the rowdy spectators, over-elaborate and lecherous kissing actions, 40 sets of ears listening to your every word to use as ammo against you in the dining hall and, naturally, the old classic of simulated sex with a nearby chair by so-called friends trying to distract.

You can twitter all you want on your smart phone, but you just don’t get the same life experience.

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