Tuesday 16 January 2018

Contact!

Welcome to the early noughties:

At the beginning of this year I bought my very first smartphone. Until now I have been relying on a waterproof ruggedized candybar phone with actual buttons and a battery that lasts a fortnight. The old phone was so dated that my friends call it "Edison's prototype" – Before you say that Edison didn't invent the telephone, he was instrumental in developing the exchanges and the microphones that made them practical.

The old and the new phone were so different in age and technology that I had to spend a morning manually transferring all my contacts. My friends and aquaintances seem to fall into four groups. The largest group was "People I don't remember, or have no expectation of ever speaking to again" followed by "People I often deal with". There was a smaller group of "People I might accidentally lose contact with" I found myself checking, double checking and triple checking those phone numbers. The top of the pile was "people who's numbers I know by heart - like a nursey rhyme".

Other than that there was one person with an awkward to type name – how do you type an "o" with a tilde above it? And a friend, long since dead, whose number I had never deleted as a mark of respect.

Richard "Android" B

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