Craig McCaw, the pioneer of cellular telephones, is giving his wife Wendy $400 million in a divorce settlement. Excuse me, Wendy, but I rather think that some of that there money is mine. Not a lot, but some of it. An eggcupful of the water in one of your swimming pools, say, was paid for by me through the mobile phone business pioneered by the hubbie. For I am one of those wot wuz dun. I am a victim. I need counselling.
I could tell you I got the phone because I Need To Be In Contact With The Office, or The Editor Gets Nervous When He Can't talk To Me At The Drop Of A Secretary; but really it comes down to this: Menopausal Vanity. Some men start dyeing their hair at my time of life, others buy Cadillac convertibles and listen to loud twenty-somethings' music, and others squeeze themselves into velvet flares, smoke dope and hang out with babes.
Me, I got a cellular phone. Pathetic. If the menopausal crisis has two bites at the cherry, the next time I'm going to opt for (a) the white Caddy, (b) some babes and (c) no Eircell phone.
Irresistible offer
The invitation to join Eircell came through the ESB - a scattergun hunt for the weak, the pathetic, the gullible, the menopausal. Because I paid my ESB bill on time, I'd get a discount on a new Eirecell phone, and thus be able to contact the world wherever I was. An irresistible offer. For the menopausal.
And I actually believed that my Eircell would work wherever I took it. And it did, to a degree. In Connemara, for example, there's a spot, two feet square, on top of a small mountain outside Ballyconneally, where, if you stand on your head pointing three degrees north of nor' nor' east, sometime around sunrise it is theoretically possible to get an Eircell signal.
Similarly, I found a tree in West Cork where, if I hung myself from the fourth bough from the top between the hours of midnight and dawn, I could make a phone call remarkably like Marconi's first, full of eeks, squeaks, and elephants farting, with even the odd word or two of conversation. Otherwise, outside Dublin it barely worked at all.
That's not all. When you join Eircell, they forget to tell that though there is an in-built message system, it costs a fortune to access it. Every time I checked for messages - which callers were invited to leave whenever I was out of range, which was often - I was charged. "It's a huge con," admitted an Eircell operator cheerfully. "You can't even delete the message until you've heard it all, and meanwhile you're paying for the call."
Con is right. But Great Phone Robbery is righter. To receive my messages on one occasion cost me £1.12 for 2 minutes 29 seconds listening time. Even a 27-second message-call cost me 20p. Thirteen checks on the message system cost me £5.14p. And to be able to make international calls, I had to pay a £50 deposit, even though Eircell directly debit their bills from my bank account anyway.
A white Caddy would have been cheaper. And more fun. Not to speak of the babes.
Derogatory message
I had left a derogatory message about my mobile phone on my voice-mail in The Irish Times, and someone told Eircell about it. In much anguish, they offered to replace my 087- number with an 088- number, which would be more accessible. Funny no-one mentioned that before. All calls to my old number would be automatically switched through to my new number.
Indeed they were: and, as I discovered when my first bill for my new phone arrived, at the cost of 10p for each one. I was now paying for complete strangers to telephone me. Wonderful. But at least I was spared the cost of accessing messages (as we computer-types say), because there weren't any. Callers who found I was not answering were told no message facility was available.
I could have complained to their PR woman, but I wanted to see what the ordinary customer has to go through, so I tried to ring Eircell Enquiries, for two days. Their computercontrolled system could not recognise my account number, and I was put on hold for an operator. None arrived. Repeatedly. For two days. I tried their ordinary number. No reply. For two days. So I finally rang their PR officer. She wasn't in. I left a message, and I was rung by an engineer who said that the charges for re-directing the calls would now be remitted, and he'd check on the message system, and as for the nonanswered calls to Eircell, he said that Eircell could not give a 100 per cent undertaking to answer the phone the whole time.
Extra phone bills
Bloody wonderful. Eircell: the telephone people who don't answer the telephone, who charge you for incoming calls, whose coverage is so poor that people have to leave messages, and then you have to listen to them in their entirety, thereby running up extra phone bills, or on the other hand callers are told the message-facility isn't working, even though you're paying for it.
Not everybody is angry, of course. Listen to the sound. It is of the McCaws, beside one of their swimming pools, slapping their thighs and baying with joy, while beside them my eggcupful of azure water is trying to ring home. Unsuccessfully.