I’m not good with phones. Never have been. Which is why there are currently 31 messages on the ansaphone (it’s not that I’m popular, it’s just that there’s a machine somewhere that’s convinced that our number is the number of a fax machine that its madly in love with and so it rings it constantly - either that or ET is getting seriously pissed off) I phone my mum on a Sunday night and one night through the week as well – just to check in, and my Nan phones me twice a week. I would be happy to call her, but if I do that then we spend the next hour going through the “put your phone down and I’ll phone you back to save your bill” “no Nan I can afford to call you” conversation that all grandma’s have when their grandchildren call them, because even when you’re grown up and have a job and a house and all that stuff and your grandparent’s existing on the insult that the government call a state pension, they’re still convinced that the only income you have coming in is your pocket money.

Actually that’s not true; the most righteous MC Grandma S of the WI posse doesn’t go through the whole “hang up and I’ll call you back” routine, she just hangs up when she thinks that the call has gone on long enough. This can be (and often is) midsentence. She keeps mentioning something about her hearing aid cutting out but we’re convinced that she’s worried that the fuzz have put a tap on the line.

Mostly, my dislike of using the phone is confined to actually calling people. I’m never sure of whether or not I’m intruding on them. I mean I often don’t want to be disturbed and so I try to extent the same courtesy to others and therefore I don’t phone just to have a chat. (Obviously parents are different because they’ll just tell you to go away if they’re busy, and if they’re our parents then they may not even be that polite)

I don’t have that much problem with people calling me. I never deliberately let the ansaphone cut in. But as result of the length of time it takes me to pick up the damn thing, I’ve now got a totally undeserved reputation (and not for the first time) as someone who doesn’t answer the phone. It’s not that if you call, I’ll ignore you. I won’t (well not unless you’re from the bank). I’ll do a mad dash from the kitchen or the computer room, grabbing my fags on the way and I’ll bang my shin on the corner of the coffee table in my haste to get to the phone before the ansaphone cuts in and I’ll fail because the ansaphones set to two rings before it picks up and starts the “I’m afraid no ones in to take your call please leave a message…” routine that it does in a voice which is dead ringer for the queen. But that’s the reason I always sound so pissed off when I answer the phone. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you. It’s just that what I really want to do is hop round the living room clutching my calf while screaming “fuck fuck fuck ouch ouch ouch” (I used to scream “fuckit fuckit fuckit ouch ouch ouch” but our living room wall backs onto our neighbours bedroom and I started to get funny looks when I passed her on the stairs…)

To a certain extent F is the same. He doesn’t ignore the phone but he does screen all the calls that come in. This is partly because of all the weird and wonderful people that used to call him when he lived in Lala land – some of them apparently so lala that they forgot that they had called him and left long messages wondering why whenever he called them he was out and partly this is because of the people in London who wanted to kill us (one of the reasons why we escaped to here in the first place) and partly because if he’s musicking then nothing and nobody can disturb him. So we’re quite well suited.

But we differ in one crucial aspect. F, is a major mobile phone junkie. I am not. I hate the bloody things. I wish they had never been invented. Texting is fine (it’s only ever herebe and occasionally Jboy who texts me so I feel free to ignore them with faint regard) but I’d rather carry a hand grenade in my bag than a mobile phone.

For a start there’s the heart attack you have when the thing rings – By the time you’ve loudly cursed the fact that someone is disturbing the peace with their bloody phone you’ve realised that it’s your phone that’s disturbing the peace, although you usually forget to bring it with you much less switch it on. And, not only does it not stop ringing but with each peal the volume increases until everybody is staring at you and wondering firstly; why you don’t answer your phone and secondly, why you have the first 4 bars of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung as your ringtone (the reason being it was the only song that you could think of on the night that someone offered to programme a personal ringtone for you and now it’s too late to have something cooler as they’re too busy to reprogramme it)

So you venture into the very depths of the abyss, otherwise known as the bottom of your handbag to find the thing. And, as you scuttle round in the murk – unearthing enough pink toilet tissue paper to dress a dairy queen, (and it’s only ever pink toilet tissue even if you’ve never in life bought anything other than Andrex white) bus tickets from a town you’ve never been to, sweet wrappers of boiled sweets that you can’t remember buying much less eating, a needle that will embed itself up to the eye underneath your fingernails, a hairbrush that is more hairs than brush and a mascara wand you wish could magic you from this embarrassing dimension - you find the damn thing just as it stops its tolling. So you relax and cast it back into the depths from whence it came.

Where it promptly starts up again. This time it’s something called voicemail which seems to think that it’s of the utmost importance that you heed the call that you never wanted to listen to in the first place. And voicemail is as persistent as a Jehovahs Witness.

I mention these things because in order to understand what happens next you need to understand that when it comes to mobile phones I am a Luddite. In fact, when it comes to mobile phones I think the Luddites had the right idea (they just implemented it on the wrong technology – there is nothing wrong with 40 denier black opaque’s) As you may gather I’m a bit of an anti-mobile person. But, I now work from home. And because I work from home, and because I persistently refused to give out my home phone number (which I think is eminently reasonable) to the people who have a perfect right to call me whenever they so desire – all x thousand of them - the powers that be within the company gifted me with a mobile phone so that I would be contactable should anyone feel the urge to try to win a multimillion pound deal on the strength of a gradient fill.

But it’s not just a mobile phone. I could just about cope with that. It has Bluetooth. I have no idea what Bluetooth is, much less how to work it but apparently it has something to do with the box that came with the phone, a box which I’ve never opened but which bears a picture of something that looks like a really painful contraceptive. It has something called push to talk which seemed to be fairly explanatory even to me, but when I did - push to talk- the thing not only refused to talk but made all sorts of squeaking noises and then refused to talk anymore. In fact, the only 2 useful functions that it seems to have are an alarm clock that refuses to stop even when you switch it off and the facility for herebe to text me to check that I’m still alive (every so often he gets a bit worried) even though I’m never sure – because it doesn’t tell me – that I’m actually replying to his messages. Actually I’m not even sure how he got my number because I don’t know what it is, so how could he?

So there it is. A mobile phone; with all singing, all dancing technology and someone who has a dislike of phones in general and mobile phones in particular. You just know that something hilarious is going to happen next. Stick around.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a big project. Well, that’s what they call it. I call it a right royal pain in the ass. It hasn’t stopped me overworking to match the deadlines and get everything looking perfect, but that’s partly my own professional pride and partly the knowledge that if it looked crappy then the too tight deadline wouldn’t be the thing that was blamed.

So now I’m tired. Chain smokingly, bleary eyed feels like you’re coming down off of speed sort of tired. And I’m eating loads of carbs to compensate (which are not good for me because, at the risk of sounding like a hypochondriac, I’m also very sensitive to carbs – esp bread, pies and pasta - which are the things I crave when I get tired but which are also the things that give me violent mood swings if I od on them – and od’ing on them is a slice of bread a day for three days running and do not under any circumstances eat a plate of pasta unless you want to take out an army with your bare hands) to combat the tiredness because it’s a family thing that we all have wonky blood sugar levels and if we get tired and then we don’t eat like we’re about to go out and single-handedly lay down a hundred miles of railroad track – then we get really (and I mean psychotically) bad tempered and snappy. So I’m under slept and I’m eating all the wrong stuff and I’m in a fierce mood. But even then that’s ok, because there’s nothing like the adrenaline rush from a fierce bad mood to help you get things done. Except when you’ve spent the past week eating all the wrong stuff and you have PMS and you’re under slept. On those days, when I’m already tired and hormonal and on the verge of a hypo, I don’t do deadlines. Well I do deadlines, but I don’t do people repeatedly phoning and breaking my concentration while I’m working, very well. And though I’m never ever anything other than professional when someone calls, and though I’m never ever anything than nice and calm and helpful when I speak to someone on the phone, I have the classic forgetfulness of a low-blood-sugared-premenstrual-underslept-mind-of an- otherwise occupied woman.

Which means that when, after the umpteenth call asking if something will be ready for a deadline that is five minutes away I will, when the call is finished, slam the bloody thing down and scream “you are a fucking twat” at the top of my voice in order to let off some of the tension that has been building up. And, being a low-blood-sugared-premenstrual-underslept-woman with an otherwise occupied mind and only having a hazy idea of how to operate my mobile phone. I will have forgotten to press the button that hangs up the damn thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 11:38 pm and is filed under anger (mis) management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.