True calling – Fionnuala Ward on payphones

I needed to change phone providers recently but wanted to hang onto my number. It turned into quite the palaver. For a while, it even looked like I was going to be effectively phoneless for a few days while these high-level arrangements were being put in place. The very prospect gave rise to a moment’s panic. No phone! How would I manage?

It didn’t come to pass in the end. And, of course, I’d have managed fine. Perfectly fine.

And anyway, I’m of a generation that can remember a phoneless existence and the heady excitement of that existence coming to an end. There was a waiting list involved. And this waiting list went on for months and months, if not years and years, unless you could inveigle a local politician to get involved. Without that grubby intervention, you could die on that list. You could die waiting to get onto that list.

And phone calls were so expensive. Our parents never tired of telling us how expensive they were. Very expensive. So very expensive, with trunk calls being the worse. Trunk calls were calls outside your local area which were charged at a three-minute rate. My best friend from school lived in another town and we rang each other occasionally.

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Very, very occasionally.

Three minutes in and you could almost hear the whish of money disappearing down the line. Six minutes in and the whish turned into a torrent. Nine minutes in and a scowling adult materialised in the immediate vicinity.

Then there were the international calls. To the US mainly. We had relations in New Jersey and these calls had to be booked in advance. The operator would ring to let us know that a line had been secured. That all systems were go. And between the crackles and the voice delays both sides would get around to communicating the time of day in their respective locations and that would be pretty much it.

Before you knew it the operator would be back on to put paid to any more trans-Atlantic intimacies.

Later in life, making calls from flats or bedsits involved the assiduous collection of five-pence coins for the pay phone on the wall in the hall. These had to be pumped into the slot, one after another, as the conversation progressed – clunk, clunk, clunk – while agitated flatmates paced nearby rooms, their own sweaty stash in hand.

But now the phone is rarely used for the purpose it was invented. In fact, one of its main functions is to avoid or circumvent communication which involves speaking directly to another person.

Setting aside the whole online thing, it’s all texting or phubbing.

Texting is great. It’s fun and functional and gets the job done. But as communication goes, it’s on the fast food side of the spectrum. Filling but insubstantial.

Phubbing is one of those of-the-moment words. A mixture of snub and phone. According to the OED, it is “the practice of ignoring one’s companion or companions in order to pay attention to one’s phone or other mobile device”. So it’s all about closing down communication of any kind.

A New Yorker cartoon from recent times has a man turning to his companion in a bar with the words: “I used to call people, then I got into emailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone.”

Is that where we’re headed?

Maybe but then again maybe the lockdowns will have headed that off at the pass. I certainly found myself going back to the old-fashioned phone call. Zoom was grand yet also oddly stressful and I more or less abandoned it for social interactions by lockdown number two.

Instead, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, I found myself immersed in long, wonderfully animated conversations about what I’d eaten so far that day and what the person on the other end had eaten so far that day and what I planned to eat for the rest of that day and what the person on the other end planned to eat for the rest of that day.

I’m sure I’d have survived without a phone for a day or two or three while that changeover of providers took place. But equally I have no doubt that I’d have been happy, so very, very happy to return to the phone-filled fold when that period was up.

And for the quaint, under-rated reason of accessing somebody’s number in my contacts and pressing that green icon to call. Actually call.