Unabashed windbags are making my ears hurt
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday March 17, 2010
I'M OLD enough to remember when telephones had a separate earpiece and when many of them hung on the wall. If you were a small child, as I was in the 1940s, you had to stand on a box to speak into the trumpet-like mouthpiece. Not many people had phones in those days. Urgent messages of any importance were sent by telegram, and if you received one the news was very good or very bad: you had won the lottery or your favourite aunt had died. The likelihood of anyone sending a telegram saying "I'm on the train" were zero.I'm also old enough to remember that when you spoke in public you did so in a hushed voice. My mother would wag an admonishing finger if we dared speak in anything louder than a whisper. "Remember you're out," she would say, and we made sure we did.These days phones are small enough to sit in the palm of your hand and, far from being scarce, are of plague proportions. As well as being used by people to inform their friends of their immediate whereabouts, they also serve as cameras, navigational aids, computers and dozens of other things with which this luddite, non-mobile user is unfamiliar. And when they are used simply as telephones, it seems it is necessary to talk into them as loudly as possible. I have heard various theories of why this is so, but don't see why I should be forced to eavesdrop on the most intimate details of the lives of complete strangers.There is a time of day - I call it the witching hour - when all over the streets of Sydney, people disgorge from office buildings as the working day draws to a close. Do they hurry to the nearest train station, bus stop or ferry wharf, eager to get home before dark? No, they linger on the footpath and, almost as one, raise those precious pieces of plastic to their ears.I can only compare it to smokers, lighting up after a day on nicotine patches. Such blessed relief. It is a truly bizarre sight: hundreds of these addicts getting their fix in a spontaneous yet synchronised display that couldn't be more in concert if it had been rehearsed for a week.And what is the first thing they do when those phones reach their ears? They begin to talk in very loud voices. I only wish my mother were still alive. She'd give them what for. I can see her now, waving that finger and saying in hushed but firm tones, "Remember you're out."
© 2010 Sydney Morning Herald
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