EVERYBODY these days' seems to want to give me a mobile phone. My insurance company is offering me one for free. No charge. Just a mobile phone, on the mail, and a fresh mobile phone offer leaps out at you. A pint of Guinness? Certainly, sir - and have a mobilephone while you're at it.
If it continues like this, mobile phones will be like those little plastic things you used to get in cornflake packets, which seemed to have no purpose in life other than that children collected them avidly. Nobody bought cornflakes for cornflakes' sake, they bought them for these tiny devices which had no known use. Who knows, maybe they were IUDs, and Kellogg's were engaged in a vast conspiracy to supply contraceptives to the women of Ireland, who instead gave them to their, children to play with while they were losing their cornflakes to morning sickness.
Banker in Zurich
Nowadays it's mobile phones. They seem like a well, interesting idea before you actually get one. Those calls from your Hollywood agent. Your banker in Zurich. The coke dealer 9ff the Cork coast. You might miss them at a vital moment, and instead of the coke dealer dropping off your consignment at Schull, he vanishes to a ready offer from elsewhere.
On the other hand, an awful lot of people who use mobile phones are quite clearly not the sort one would invite home. Once upon a time such people were known as CBP, darling comb in back pocket. Nowadays they drive red car vans to the thump of megawatt music, swear sunglasses, and smoke Camel cigarettes. Women in such vehicles have blonde hair and smoke long tipped cigarettes, and always use their mobile phones as they corner.
I said at the outset that these people drive car vans. That is not correct. The vehicles are named after their drivers, and hence are known as van cars. These van cars use their car phones everywhere - in pubs, restaurants, parks, possibly funerals, too.
In fact, mobile phones are helpful in that regard. The use of a mobile phone in a pub or restaurant declares the user to be a complete and Litter van car. So there was this compelling argument against having a mobile phone; on the other hand, there might soon be this consignment of coke, bouncing off the West Cork coast.
Sweet enough deal
So I decided to try one of these mobile phones on trial. No rental but I would pay for the calls, which initially seemed a sweet enough deal. What I didn't know was that mobile phones spend money like Ivana Trump. Or that mobile phones are addicts to telephone sex, and spend hours and hours listening to accounts of sexual acts from telephone numbers in Thailand. Or maybe my mobile was accepting reverse charge calls from the Space Shuttle or Challenger Five, somewhere just outside Jupiter.
Certainly the bills which began to pour in seemed utterly unrelated to any calls I was making. I know what I am a male of the species. My phone calls resemble those radio transmissions in which a million items of information are compressed into a single beep. Those who hear my phone calls are often unaware that I have made them, such is the pungent brevity of my telephonic style. When I want to ring a telephone sex line in Caracas, I do so from The Irish Times, not on my mobile phone.
The bills were simply astounding. I discovered one reason why. A friend's number, which I know for a certain fact was rung only once, appears four times in the itemised bill which I had demanded after fainting at the size of the first bill. Another item suggests that I was talking to a friend for about an hour and a half on a satellite phone.
There can be no reasonable explanation for some of the charges, which might fairly reflect the level of telephonic activity in Manhattan the day war broke out, there was a stock market crash and Donald Trump was found to be a transvestite lesbian Australian aborigine called Abigail, but which are and were utterly unrelated to anything I might do, or even want to do, on the telephone. Anyway, the moment the person I have phoned discovers who he or she is speaking to, they yell, ooops, a small house fire has just broken out, their grandmother has got into the bath with a two bar fire or they have just realised they are in childbirth - sorry darling, must dash, by-eee.
It is not possible for me to run up a large telephone bill. Even the speaking clock thinks up an excuse and hangs up on me the moment it realises, with a sinking mainwheel, who has phoned it. I once managed to have a phone call lasting 15 minutes without the person I called hanging up. How could they hang up? Dropped dead of a heart attack the moment they heard who it was. Otherwise, my conversations are short.
Hundreds of pounds
Yet here were these bills for hundreds of pounds just rolling in. I got a clue as to what was going on when my answering machine at home recorded an entire conversation of mine in a pub, but without my telephoning home. It seems my mobile phone, bored with eavesdropping on my restaurant chat but believe me, not as bored as the person I was talking to, sitting there bound and gagged, wide eyed and weeping the only way I can keep a companion for the full duration of lunch is by the judicious use of restraints - had phoned me at home. No one was in, my answerphone clicked into action, and recorded the minutes of conversation which followed.
I don't know how many other calls my mobile phone made. No doubt there were mobile folk kin in La Paz and Tierra del Fuego, Wellington and Anchorage, Vladivostock and Pitcairn, who were rung at my expense. Needless to say, I returned the phone. Others are queuing up to let me have new phones.
What is the trend? Will mobile phones be a fad as passing as plastic yokes in cornflakes? In the meantime, I will probably miss my next coke shipment; and anthracite too; not to speak of that ton of nutty slack. All bobbing at sea, waiting for me to get my next mobile phone.