It is the normal human experience that the more one practises something, the better one becomes at it. The child who on her first day at dance school performs like a newly born giraffe will in time become a ballerina.
The tightrope-walker who spends his first day clinging to the high wire like a pubic louse in its epidermal nest will ultimately be strutting above a gaping audience, confident as a seagull.
This is an almost universal phenomenon: the more one does something, the more skilled one becomes - except at dealing with phone calls. And as Vodaphone's and O2's recent figures suggest, we are making staggering numbers of them. Those two companies made profits of over €550 million last year in Ireland alone. In Vodaphone's case, we spent €1,200 million on calls. If just men were phoning men, that would probably mean a total of about 300,000 million calls. If just women were phoning women, it would mean about 120 calls. However, I imagine it's a bit of a mix and, overall, a hell of lot of calls.
That being so, why is it that vast numbers of people seem incapable of answering the phone properly? I know it's a while since, aged eight, I learnt how to answer the phone, but surely what applied then applies now.
"Hello," I was taught to say. "This is Leicester 59147." (Bizarrely, my childhood phone number, and both my current mobile and landline numbers contain the consecutive digits 147: phone for Mulder and Scully!).
My dulcetly boyish greeting was not, I grant you, a Shakespearean sonnet, but it was clear, lucid and to the point. (Perhaps its antique charm is enhanced by the knowledge that the speaker wore shorts 365 days a year, we had two ladies wot does, and in summer we went for picnics. Just painting a social picture.)
My telephonic welcome was no doubt reassuring for the patients looking for my GP father. It meant they were in the hands of a competent young fellow to whom they could confess their symptoms. ("How very frustrating for you, Mrs Witherspoon: tell me, how long your husband has been having these personal problems? I see. Have you tried French underwear?") These days, almost nobody answers their personal phones properly any more.
At best, you might get the American "Hi," though it really takes very little more effort to say "Hello", or to identify the number that someone has gone to the trouble of dialling. ("Dial": I know, I know, phones don't have dials or bells any more).
And if the person answering the phone is an adolescent male, you will at best be treated simply to a sullen grunt. I suppose the lad has other things on his mind, but I too was once an adolescent, and I rather think I managed to answer the phone, even through those tortured years, without sounding like a boar idly belching.
Moreover, asking such fine fellows to take a message is almost like requesting them to mow the Curragh or sweep the North Pole's front path clear of snow: you are treated to a series of incredulous chokes and wheezes of unexpected injustice, as you might hear from Cardinal Connell moments after he has been harpooned through the guts by Dana.
But of course, it's not surprising that boys fumbling through the darkened streets of Endocrine City are unable to manage the simplest detail of telephone etiquette when their parents are barely able to manage any better - even though, with the communications revolution, answering the phone is what most of us do the whole time. The majority of people - especially if they are women - are nowadays freelance telephonists but, paradoxically, utterly unskilled ones, without any of the gracious and polished courtesies of the past.
An average woman can expect to make 20 personal phone calls a day, the same number I make in a year. Each of hers will last 45 minutes; each of mine will last as long as 15 or even 16 seconds. Conversely, I receive a personal phone call once every two or three months. Yet, rare though such telephonic visitations are, I invariably still remember to give my name or number, combined with a greeting which is neither ingratiating nor supercilious, but - I like to think - is poised with gentlemanly elegance between the two, embodying a politely Jeevesian gravitas. So why does almost no one else do this? (So, repeat after me: Hello. This is Leicester 59147).
Yet for all our bad manners, we are awash with telephones: there are some 15 million mobile phones in Ireland, but only 4 million in use. The rest are in drawers, like the forgotten toys of my childhood.
Now here comes the sales pitch. The Jack and Jill Foundation is a quite splendid organisation which gives families with seriously ill children full nursing cover while the parents take a break, confident that all is well at home.
This is an absolutely vital service, because the State provides no such service to families so burdened. If you have any phones you no longer use, ring or dial - as we still say of bell-less, dial-less phones - freephone 1850 525545 for a free post-bag.
Then post your phone to J & J, and they can sell it on to a phone-broker, who in turn will sell it in eastern Europe or China, where they probably still know how to answer the phone properly.
1850 525545 for all your redundant mobile phones.