[45] How Did We Survive?

The other day I was travelling on a train from Brisbane to the Gold Coast when the young lady opposite used her mobile telephone to inform her husband that she would be “at the train station in fifteen minutes”. Fifteen minutes later, after the lady had alighted at her destination, the older lady next to me uttered the oft-heard lament: “How did we survive in the old days?”

Aside from my taking umbrage at her obviously including me in the “we” when referring to “the old days” her comment got me thinking. Why do older people automatically pour scorn on new technology on the basis that “we survived very well without it in our day”?

I grew up in the pre-internet world, but cannot now imagine life without my Personal Computer. If I want to know how to make a Lasagne Verdi, I look up the internet and print the recipe on an A4 sheet of paper then hand it to my wife. If I want to know who scored the goals for Scotland when they defeated England 3-2 in 1967, I look it up on the internet. If I want to re-read a book which is 20 years out of date, I go to the internet and buy it online and have it delivered to my door within a few days.

I remember about 25 years ago when the Automated Telling Machine (ATM) started to become a feature of every High Street. An older man in my office told everyone that he had resolved never to use these “diabolical contraptions” as he preferred to queue up in the bank and speak to a human being when he wanted to draw cash from his account. Presumably he would also queue up inside the bank just to find out the balance on his account, whereas I frequently use the internet and online banking to establish the state of my account; to find out whether or not the overseas cheque has cleared; and to remind myself when my direct debit to the telephone company is due to be paid; all from the comfort of my own living room.

Going back to the lady on the train, the ubiquitous mobile phone certainly has come in for a great deal of criticism on the grounds that the world spun successfully on its axis without it for billions of years. Admittedly, I have witnessed the mobile phone being utilised in the most bizarre circumstances. I stood at the bar of one of those huge eating and drinking establishments which was once a banking hall. The man in front of me was ordering food and drinks when the bartender asked him for his table number. As I have said, it was a very large establishment, but rather than walk the 30 yards or so to discover his table number, he quickly pushed a button on his mobile phone and asked his wife to furnish him with the required information.

Back in Scotland I knew a man who would lie in bed every Sunday morning reading the Sunday papers with a cup of coffee. His wife swore it was true when she told me he phoned her from his mobile phone from the bedroom to the living room to inform her that she had forgotten to put sugar in his coffee.

The internet also has its negative side. My cousin in Liverpool told me the story of how his wife telephoned the pub to find out if he was there. The bar manager asked him if he was there. He said no, and his wife was told he had not been seen. A few minutes later, his daughter came downstairs and excitedly told her mother, “I can see daddy.”

“Where?” said her mother.

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

A few moments later, the mother was seated in front of her daughter’s PC watching her husband drink beer with his friends in the very bar she had just phoned to be told he wasn’t there. The bar had recently installed a live webcam.

Needless to say another phone call was made to the bar and no more lies were told. Within 24 hours the webcam was removed – in the interests of customer privacy.

Quite right too.

However, there can be no doubting the fact that the mobile phone is a veritable godsend in many different ways. How many parents with teenage children - especially daughters - have received calls from mobile phones telling them that their children are stuck in the middle of nowhere and can’t afford a taxi fare and “can you pick me up?” My own son once called me from his mobile phone in the toilet of an Edinburgh nightclub with the news that a gang of thugs were waiting outside to beat him to a pulp. I was able to drive to the back door of the club and have the doorman escort my son into the car to be driven home to safety.

A friend of mine took a late-night mobile phone call from her 17 year-old daughter who had been thrown off the last bus because a fight had broken out among some boys. She was walking home alone in the freezing fog and was very scared. Her mother was able to drive to her and pick her up within minutes.

There can be few things more terrifying for a woman on her own than for her car to break down in a remote area in darkness. In years goneby she would have had to lock her doors and sit tight and wait for help, and even then decide whether or not to open the door to the strange man who had stopped to offer assistance. Alternatively, she could risk walking along the darkened road in search of a telephone. Nowadays, all she has to do is use her mobile phone to call her boyfriend, husband, brother, father, friend or indeed the breakdown services or the police.

As for the old lady on the train from Brisbane, no sooner had she uttered the words than I took out my own mobile phone and informed Kerrianne that I would be at Nerang in ten minutes. I wonder if the woman would have found it more acceptable for me to wait until I got to Nerang and call my wife from the public telephone in the railway station, then hang around for the ten minutes it takes her to drive there.

Three cheers for the mobile phone.