Communications For Today

A SUBTITLE: You Can Hide Your Head In The Sand But Technology And The Way We Communicate Is Going To Bite You On The Bottom More Than Once A Day.
My friend Suzanne made the following comment on Facebook (via the wall or newsfeed or whatever)......... "So many communication tools available and yet so ineffective when it comes to reaching my son"....
This says it all, we are making life too complicated for each other, everything has gone too far. By the time you have decided how you are going to contact somebody you have forgotten what you were going to say.

Last week my beautiful daughter forgot something that she needed to return to a friend at school. And it was important. Whilst in a computer class she was able to chat to her brother in California who sent me a text that advised me to check my email. I did and I was able to read a message from my daughter in which she outlined the problem and I was able to leap in the car, deliver the goods and make everything alright for at least 30minutes.
It seems incredible to me that a message had to go all the way via California to reach me down the road. When I was at school - just after the invention of electricity (ha!) I think we were allowed to phone home in dire emergencies. You went to Mrs Meadows, the very scary secretary, and you explained the nature of the emergency. The need for sanitary napkins or notifying parents about a completely unjustified after-school detention seemed to produce results more consistently than anything else. If she was in a good mood you were allowed to dial out from the Bakelite phone on her desk. Often the deputy head (vice-principal) would emerge from his smoke filled office to listen in. We didn't often forget things or phone home.
Today my daughter is able to sit in class, talk to Alex in California who is then able to attract my attention enabling me to read an email that Imogen wrote half an hour ago. This networking gave me the opportunity and the excuse I needed to talk to Alex on the phone in order to check that he was eating right and wearing clean underwear. I then took the time to email Matthew, tell him about the family networking and I could tack on an inquiry about washing behind ears and remembering 'pleases and thank yous'. I was able to tell David about it all over dinner that night face-to-face and then I could talk about the weather. You are right...... nothing very exciting is happening to me at the moment. I have nothing to say to anyone - and yet I blog!!

My first telephone number (remember I grew up just after the invention of the car - ha!) was Burnham 20. Burnham was a small village but I can not believe it only had twenty telephones, I don't know how the numbering went. The telephone exchange was at the top of the High Street. To make a call you picked up the receiver and asked the operator to connect you with Burnham 19 or whoever you wanted to speak to. The telephone in our house was on the telephone table which sat in the entrance hall. The directory was on the bottom shelf and the phone on the top. You didn't have a chair to sit on. If you wanted to communicate at length with someone you wrote a letter.

As time went on our phone number became Burnham 5020 and you didn't speak to an operator you could dial direct. If you wanted the operator you dialled 100 and she could help you with more complicated problems. My best friend Julie and I could be entertained for hours when we were left on our own with the telephone. We would dial 100 and when the operator answered we would say - in what we believed was a mature voice "Operator are you on the line?" If she answered in the affirmative, which she always did, we tried to suppress our mirth and shriek (mature voices forgotten) "Well get off there's a train coming". It would appear that not only have huge strides been made in the communication field but humor has become more sophisticated.
Because my father worked away from home a lot we were one of the first families in our small community to get an extension line so that Mum could have a phone by her bed. This enabled Julie and I to try daring new tricks. We would dial a random number and then as someone picked up we would start this conversation between each other using the extension line. We would pretend to be robbers planning the next heist or a couple who needed to plan a murder of an unwanted husband or wife we were desperate for the unknown number to be sucked in. They never were. I can only think that we weren't allowed much television in those days.

Sadly opportunities to have fun on the phone have been diminished greatly with the invention of the itemized phone bill and the technology that allows you to identify the number that has just been rung. I can not think that my parents or Julie's parents would foot the bill for so many calls to the operator if they had known they were going on.
Kids these days are called into account for the cost of their communicating. If you are on the wrong plan teenage texting can do serious damage to a bank account. This is especially annoying if the level of communication is not particularly inspiring. One text message 'what's up?' with the reply 'nothing much' can cost as much as three dollars.

Texting, tweeting, IM'ing or working with facebook have created a whole new world which is much too complicated to understand. The remake of E.T. is obviously not going to include the line "phone home". He would give us a facebook link.