Roger, over … and out

Something unusual happened to me yesterday. Whilst spending Friday and Saturday with my aged parent in the country – in a spot where mobile network signals are sometimes variable to the point where anyone wishing to use a mobile tends to to set off towards the bottom of the garden in the quest to gain a connection – I had cause to make a call on Saturday morning only to discover that my mobile’s symbol for strength of signal was registering nil, irrespective of wherever I moved in pursuit of one.

I am unusual in that I use my mobile to make most of my calls, mainly because all contact details for those I habitually call are stored in its memory – a fact that prompts me to ‘let go’ of any need to keep other records of, or even commit to memory, anyone’s phone number.

Another example of eccentricity on my part is that I don’t have a land line. Well, not one that works anyway. About two years ago – out of the blue – my land line went on the blink. It took a while for me to notice the development because, living alone most of the time, I just tend to get on with my life and accordingly find it irritating on principle when people ring me up just as I am settling down to eat a meal, read a book or the newspapers, go online or even just watch some television.

People say “If you don’t want to answer your phone, then don’t – what’s your problem? …” but it’s never quite that simple. Only a small number of people ever knew my land line number, so – when you have decided to ignore its ringing as recommended – and it then rings seven, eight or occasionally fifteen times, despite your best efforts you cannot stop yourself beginning to worry.

Could the call be of vital importance, for example my elderly parent having suffered a fall and broken his hip or something and he’s desperately trying to summon help?

So, eventually and inevitably, I would pick up the phone … usually only to discover that it was the Mr Pooter-type busybody in my block who possesses an uncanny in-built knack of choosing the most inappropriate  time possible to bore me to death with some minutae of detail about the problem of cat shit he’s found once again on the ‘common parts’ stairs, or something similar of absolutely zero interest to me, just as I am bedding myself in to watch the Strictly Come Dancing Sunday night results show on BBC1.

That was the reason that it took me a while to appreciate that my land line was kaput. To be frank, I was enjoying the ‘phone silence’.

After a few weeks of this, I had need to make an outgoing call on my land line and found it effectively dead.

So I called the customer line of my phone line provider, Virgin Media, and got an engineer out to research the problem and then hopefully rectify it. In anticipation of his visit, I even bought myself a pair of the latest model of phone to replace the ones I had owned for fifteen years.

Over a period of three months I had two different engineers visit me. Neither of them could restore ‘normal service’.

I couldn’t be bothered to call them out again, partly because by this time I’d become so used to operating solely on my mobile that the fact my land line didn’t work didn’t seem to matter.

Much.

(I am still paying something like £24 per month line rental for a non-existent service, but then I figured that if ever I decided to have my land line restored to working order it was better to at least have the line ‘available’).

Anyway – back to the events of the weekend.

Yesterday (Sunday) I had always intended to spend pottering about at home, reading the papers, watching the Andrew Marr and the Sunday Politics shows and maybe some television sport – and there was a lot of that on offer.

And that’s what I did, until about tea-time, when I decided that I ought to ring my aged parent to discuss some of the schedule of events for this coming week.

I went to my mobile on my computer desk to make the call and noticed that the screen was still displaying nothing where the ‘signal strength’ icon sits. (To that point I’d had no calls all day, but if I’d noticed that fact at all, which I am not sure I had, I would have been glad of the non-interference).

Suddenly it dawned upon me that I was completely out of touch with the world.

I couldn’t call anyone, even if I had wished to. It gradually dawned upon me that there might well be something wrong with my mobile phone – I mean, beyond the fact that temporarily – as sometimes happens from time to time – I could not make a call out.

It could even be a case of me not being able to make a call out permanently.

Just to let all Rust readers out there know that I’m intending to disappear off to my local Vodafone shop first thing this (Monday) morning to try and sort the problem out.

Until then I shall not be able to contact you and my only current means of communication with the world is via email.

If you haven’t heard from me by Friday, please send someone round to my place to break down the door. I might have had a fall in the meantime and been unable to raise the alarm because I’m lying on the kitchen floor and unable to get to my computer to summon help …