Me: Oh, hi dear. How are you? No, you're mother is not here. She went to Bayonne to get her nails done. Don't ask me, I have no idea why she has to go 10 kilometers to get her nails trimmed and painted. I do mine here at home, after a bath and it costs me nothing (laughing) but of course, I don't paint mine. OK, yes, call her on her mobile phone. Bye.
My wife's mobile phone rings. I search for it and find it on the kitchen table. I answer it.
Me: Oh, hi again, dear. No, I am afraid that your mother left the phone here at home. Yes, I'll tell her you called and tell her to call you back. Bye.
An hour later my wife comes in.
My wife: I am telling you; I will never go back to that place again. That woman is mad. I kept telling her that she was hurting me with her tool, which looks like a surgical knife...
Me: A scalpel...
My wife: Yes, that's it. And, she kept insisting that it was impossible for it to hurt, that that infernal instrument was proven to be safe. Well, I told her you can take your safe instrument and...
Me: Your daughter called. She says to call her back.
My wife: When did she call? I didn't hear my mobile phone ring.
Me: And I can tell you why: your mobile phone was here and you were ten kilometers away.
My wife: No, its not. Its in my bag.
She dives into that bag thing I call "the black hole" because whatever you put in it never comes out again. It is impossible to find anything there. There's more debris floating around in that thing than there is circling the Earth. I have seen tickets from shows we saw years ago, half-chewed candy from when the grandchildren were babies, and keys that belong to no door in the house, and sundry pairs of glasses, broken pencils, and coins from several countries---all floating around as if in a vacuum.
My wife: I am sure it was in my bag.
I hold up the mobile phone.
Me: Then this must be a duplicate.
My wife: Augh, you had it all the time!
Me: No, I didn't have it all the time. I just had it when it rang and you were not here.
My wife; Well, you should have given it to me when I was about to leave. You have no business keeping it here.
Me: What! No business...it is your phone you should...
My wife: Let me see how many calls I missed. Who is the Eloise?
I look at the message. It is obviously a scam. It says that it cost nearly two euros to call "Eloise" back.
Me: It is a scam. You will have to pay "Eloise" a couple of euros to call her back. Just erase it.
My wife: No, what if it is because she is in another country? Maybe that is why it costs so much to call her.
Me: Yep, she's in another country all right, perhaps Nigeria. Those fellows over there are experts at setting up these scams.
My wife: And look at his one: "Hi, we are in Oslo..."
Me: In Oslo? Like in Norway?
My wife: Who do we know in Oslo?
Me: Maybe it is their Winter Olympics committee and they want your opinion on who should represent them in the Giant Slalom.
My Wife: Oh, really, what if its for a translating job?
Me: No one in Oslo will call us for that. They email. ! Jeeze, your phone is full of scams and spam. You should change your phone number.
My wife: I have all of these numbers registered in my phone book and I don't know who these people are. I will call them to find out who they are.
Me: You're going to do what? Listen, don't; just erase them.
She ignores me and calls the first one.
My wife: No answer. Just an answering machine.
Me: Why don't you leave a message.
My wife: And, what would I say? I don't know who I am calling.
Me: You could just say: "I have no idea who you are but I have your phone number registered in my contacts, so please call back and identify yourself, anonymous.
My wife: Don't be silly.
I find that most people are strangely at odds with the technology they THINK they need. When I was in business, I used to carry two mobile phone and a beeper. And, I used them, constantly. One was for communications with the engineers that worked in my department. It also had direct walkie-talkie communications and alerts from the computer servers that were our responsibility. The other was for customers and people in the company other than those in my department. The beeper was for emergencies at night and for when I turned off the phones, like at the movies.
Yes, those phones and beeper were not half as sophisticated as the stuff even kids carry around now. But, most young people use their phones for SMS and other rather simple stuff. Their sophisticated GPS and Web and myriad of tools and apps are rarely used. And, if you don't believe me, just hunt around the Internet for statistics on what is chewing up the bandwidth of mobile phone companies.
Most adults, on the other hand, use phones for that: phoning. My wife's phone has all the gadgets you can find on any of the sophisticated, feature laden phones of today. Yet, she, like most people of her age and social demographic profile, hardly every use anything else but the phoning feature. The Web, even the camera on the thing, are rarely used features. And, it was months, if not years, before she sent a "texto" as the French call messages, from her phone. And it read: "OK".
But, it is not just phones that are like that: cars, televisions, computers--they all suffer from feature creep. How many people that you know and who own an HD TV full of HDMI and computer input ports actually hook up a computer to their TV? And from what I have seen, I am the only nerd out there who uses his "cruise control" in the car when we are on a motorway. In their mad rush to get from A to B as quickly as possible, most French drivers zoom by at 160 kilometers per hour only to have to break for a truck that is passing another truck at 90 KPH. With their stop and go driving, cruise control is useless. Yet, all of their cars have it.
It seems to me that this technological onslaught to give us features that would help us communicate better has really led to miscommunication or non-communication.
Once, when we were in Paris, my wife was laboring to call her aunt, who at the time was in a little town in southern France. She could not remember the number and she could not find it among her contacts either.
"I give up," she said closing the phone.
"Maybe if you call her daughter she will give you the phone."
"I can't", she replied.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because I am out of battery," she replied, and then added, "and I forgot my charger."
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