They can be really handy, especially when you think of something that you want to tell someone straight away before you forget, but know that they won’t be able to answer a call. Just send a text and the recipient will read it when they can.
I regularly converse with my family and several of my friends by text. It’s been particularly good to keep in touch with my daughter when she’s on holidays overseas (I can be a bit of a worrier as she has mild learning difficulties). However, if I want a long chat with someone, I tend to use the landline from the comfort of my own home.
Where the ‘hate’ part of mobile phones comes in is when I have to listen to other people’s conversations. It’s so annoying sitting on a bus with someone shouting into their phone at full volume, divulging their most intimate affairs, especially when peppered with a colourful selection of expletives. I’m sure this wasn’t the imagined scenario when mobiles finally became a reality.
Although I may occasionally use my phone for calls whilst out, these tend to be of the more urgent (well, vaguely important} variety. When asked for my phone number by companies for any reason I tend to quote the number of my landline. This is often met with a shocked, and maybe slightly pitying, “Don’t you have a mobile phone?” To which I usually answer, “No”, which stuns them into silence. Quite honestly, I’d rather someone left me a message on my answer phone at home, then try to contact me on my mobile in the middle of Tesco/bus journeys/dental treatment etc.
When I was a child (violin time again), we didn’t even have a landline! Keeping in touch with friends meant walking to their houses and knocking on their door, or for those a bit further away, going to the nearest phone box (providing they had a phone, of course). However, it used to drive me mad that I couldn’t enter the phone-in competitions on the Multi-coloured Swap Shop on a Saturday morning!
But now I have both a landline and a mobile, and to me they both have their place. As do intimate, graphic conversations – the place for these I would suggest, is definitely not on the bus!
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I wonder if this is a generation-thing. Those of us who can remember phones where you had to press button B (I was very young ...) find the intrusion of mobile hugely irritating. But my daughters think nothing of making phone calls whenever the urge takes them.
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