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Hanging on the Telephone

Sometimes when I'm in a stressful situation, my mind will wander and I'll think about what it must have been like to live hundreds of years ago.

I'll envisage in my mind's eye a yeoman in eleventh century England, ambling along to work. In this recurring daydream he's wearing a smock and carrying a pitchfork over his shoulder. The birds are chirping and the obligatory bubbling brook of clear and unpolluted water can be heard in the background.

The yeoman, let's call him Will, is about thirty. In his life he's seen little change, and when he dies the world will be much the same as when he was born. And even if there were to be any technical breakthrough, he'd unlikely be affected, as there'd be no way of him hearing about it. The town crier would hardly know what was going on in the next village, let alone the news from the technology desk of whatever passed for newspapers at the time.

What must it have been like to live life where one century was much the same as the next? It is impossible for us to imagine. Not for us the predictable life of Yeoman Will. Take phones for instance.

When I was growing up, we had no phone at home. I can't even remember my primary school friends having phones. By the time I reached high school many of the other girls had phones at home, but not me. I remember that there was a phone box on the corner of my street and I'd traipse down the street to make a call. Then as a university student we lived life in phoneless poverty.

I DID have a home phone when I went to work in the UK after uni - but then I got married and returned to Australia as the wife of a no-phone-man. Husband #1 "didn't believe in phones". He didn't believe in lots of things, including washing machines and armchairs, but that's another story.

Except for one thing; after we'd split up he decided to read every book I'd read. One was Lessing's Martha Quest trilogy. He dropped by (he didn't have a phone) - well dropped by is an exaggeration - he drove 100 miles to see me to tell me that one of the Martha Quest novels starts with the sentence, "Anna was a woman who spent much of her time on the phone..."

"She's just like YOU!" he endeavored to enlighten me. To this day I do not know what he meant. But back to Will the Yeoman.

Will wasn't a phone-man either. He was sort of like me during marriage #1, living a life where, if someone wanted to annoy you, they actually had to locate you physically. Effort was required.

Going from no phone in a society where home phones were considered normal, I, unlike Will, am now bombarded with them.

There are seven phones in our apartment. Two cell phones, two VOIP phones, an old landline phone - a relic from the dark ages of 1996, and two spare cell phones which hang around in drawers.

My cell phone can talk to my PC and to the printer. What WOULD our Will think of Bluetooth technology? It will be able to talk to the microwave when we get around to replacing the dinosaur circa 1995. It can pretend it's my work extension so that I can take my office calls in the bath. It can even understand English, but it can't talk like the new VOIP phone. Neither can it select its own music. VOIP #1 phone plays "New York New York" for incoming local calls, the banjo duel music from "Deliverance" for calls coming in from the mid west, and Men at Work's "Downunder" when there's that rare call from Australia.

I programmed my cell phone to play the Blue Danube when husband #2 (who hails from Germany) calls. It gives the right kind of middle European vibe .. . It is a bit disconcerting at my work though. During meetings cell phones ring left right and center, and the staff have taken up dancing to the various tunes. The chairman's phone plays 1980's disco. We'll be discussing budgets and off it will go.

Eight jaded New Yorkers jump up and disco. So it's a trifle discordant when husband #2 phones and we all have to change from upbeat disco to a waltz.

Phones mean that you not only do not have to see your friends - you do not even have to converse with them in real time. It's a New York thing to carry on conversations over months, without anyone having to actually be on the other end of the broadband. We just leave long messages whilst our friend does her own thing - she'll listen and answer in her own time.

This is an example of the flexibility of the modern age. If Yeoman Will wanted to talk to someone, he'd have to actually go up to him and answer when he was spoken to. Can you imagine?

Along with the features of the newer phones, there's the added fun of learning to use them. It's a wonder there aren't courses in the use of phones. Or are there? Even if there are, it amazes me that we humans are just expected to learn to use these technological wonders, when just a few months ago they weren't even a gleam in Nokia's lens.

It would be comparatively easy if each technological invention was just one thing - itself. But although it was once thought that good design demanded simplicity, nowadays phones can be cameras, calendars, and even PDAs. PDAs of course can also be phones. Is a phone-camera a camera or is it a phone? I can use my PDA as a VOIP phone. Does that mean it is a phone? Certainly not. But it's enough to make even the most reliable and stable electronic gadget turn bi-polar.

Yeoman Will sure had it easy. He was probably considered a skilled artisan if he could operate a plough. And if you knew one plough, you'd know them all. You didn't have to go to bed wondering if when you woke up your plough would also function as a spinning jenny or a butter churn. Talk about an easy life!

But ours not to reason why, ours but to do and operate. And at those times when my mind daydreams of Yeoman Will and the bubbling brook, I now try to imagine something horrible happening to him. Perhaps a crusader who has lost his way stumbles upon him and thinking him an Infidel, slaughters him unmercifully. Or Mrs. Yeoman will forget how to put wood in the stove and his dinner will be cold and raw. Maybe his daughter will elope with a pirate. Really anything nasty will do.

Just as long as like us, Will doesn't get away with an idyllic life. After all, life wasn't meant to be easy.

Kate Juliff
New York
February 2005