Memories from a cellphoneless world
When setting up a meeting over the phone, you had to keep your word: couldn't cancel it, couldn't be late more than appropriately. One of my friends made business in different pretty-long-distanced cities where he had to meet his business partners and clients. He used to tell that he would schedule his arrival - in plane or by car, with 4 to 6 hours to a meeting to make sure that everything was going accordingly to plan.
The images in the collective mind of people (men unfortunately, it's true!) waiting in the rain with a bunch of flowers pickled under a lamppost and checking his wathch from time to time, belong to that era.
After crouching the phone, one would step alone and uncertain in the street, where words cessed to exist but had a totally different force.
The force of the silence. The force of the given word, of punctuality, of the fear nurtured by the primitive brain to not finding oneself all alone if the magic encounter should not take place.
Any confusion (The Downtown Boulevard or some downtown Boulevard)?
How many lives were there violently changed by these catastrophical errors? How many loves were shattered just before they would even begin? How many fortunes vanished into thin air while others were founded just because, as the song goes, somebody took a meeting in the Mariana Trench and then somebody else on Nanga Parnat?
How many people waiting alone over some restaurant table checking the hour and leaving slamming the door after half an hour of sipping some coffee? How many of us checked up every single face of every single person in the club, thinking foolishly that he or she kept their word and showed up!...
Then, imagine the importance of a telephone through one could announce an accident or ask for help...I remember how, one cold evening, right after the engine of my car stopped, I found out that the only house of the village having a phone was the parish house. And the priest was in a holiday...
Remember the sound of landlines? With how much sadness would the phone rand in a ouse in a lazy summer afternoon? How anguish was a phone ringing in a public building, hearing it from a remote office for long minutes?
Do you remember the face of the official who took a call right in front of you and started talking transposing himself in a parallel universe to which he opened up...You could ralise that he was human, that he could say "yes", that he is gentle to his children or that he knows how to cook?
The landline with keys or with disc. Ebonite or plastic. Phone tapes for recording messages. Phones with wire spiral handset, cordless phones with antenna.
Oh! The social importance of phone cabins! Everlastingly present in every comedy / love film / theatre play! The lover calling his girlfriend from the phone cabin and looking through its glass...
Memories. As distant today as the western movies...
Nowadays, dying punctuality can be revived at any time with a call for an apology or a short message - "3 min. late "... In fact, you cannot call at all to apologize. For the person who is waiting imagines something would have happened, if you called. Then why call at all?
How about using the phone as a TV set, the video play, the music player, the photo camera, the photo and video archive, the watch, the mirror, the amusing sounds generator, computer interface and the internet in general and social networks in particular as display for gaming, camera control / audio video alien landing or assassination of Obama, calendar, alarm, spy camera or microphone, vibrator, notebook of notes, bank of songs, GPS, typewriter, radio, newspaper, converter Trade, fishing calendar, cardiograph, magnifying glass, flashlight or soothsayer, among others?
Why call at all?