There was a time the word “phone” referred to a box in the middle of a room with a speaking and listening handle. Back then most people relied heavily on the handwritten letter and the telegram to communicate with loved ones in distant lands such as the Johannesburg mines. Especially if you lived in the butt crack of the world like Pongola.
Privacy on the telephone was an alien concept back then. There would be an irritable man or woman at the exchange, who would receive all incoming calls or place calls for you, well into the 1980s. Often the response to a caller would be: “He just walked past the post office with his two dogs. .. Yes, the third dog died last week and everyone is worried that it might have been a case of rabies.” By the time the Nats decided to roll out telephones in black townships en masse in the mid-to-late 80s, the dreaded interceptor in the exchange box had all but disappeared.
I always had a love-hate relationship with the phone. Sometimes a girlfriend would call at 4.30pm because her mother had just left for a Thursday prayer meeting. I would pick up just as my gran was settling down to watch the next instalment of Santa Barbara about 1.2m from where the phone was attached to the wall. There aren’t enough code words that two 15-year-old lovers with runaway libidos could come up with to hoodwink a 79-year-old toothless granny.
Randomly calling me out of the blue always feels like an ambush. This is especially true when you have a favour to ask me. Be decent enough to forewarn me because I’m inefficient at composing lies on the spot
When we first got a landline at home, circa 1986, we were so excited by this new toy there was a competition among us kids to see who could get to the phone first when it rang. My father, the typical pragmatist and hopelessly technophobic baby boomer that he was, was far less enthusiastic about talking to faceless voices. Until he passed away in 2020, he maintained a wait-and-see attitude towards the usefulness of the internet. Anyway, the phone rings in the house one Saturday morning, around 1987, and I pounce on it. Some friendly white woman asks if she can talk to my father. My ego polished by her observation that I spoke “very good English” with a “neutral” accent”, I walk to my father, chest inflated like a puffer fish and tell him he has a phone call. As it turns out, the friendly white auntie was a debt collector he had been avoiding for weeks. My father abhorred physical violence, which says nothing about the verbal lashings he could mete out. I learnt a valuable lesson that morning: that people reserve the right to not respond to telephonic contact if they don’t feel like it.
Unfortunately most people don’t seem to have been reprimanded by their own fathers for forcing them to talk to insolent ladies from McCarthy vehicle credit control. This is why people feel so entitled to having their calls picked up and e-mails/texts responded to. I do not know how often I’ve had to explain to people that WhatsApp blue ticks from me don’t mean I’ve applied my mind to whatever they’ve sent. Often all it means is that I opened the message. I may have read the first few lines, assigned the text position No 37 in the pending queue and opted to spend the afternoon watching YouTube clips of humans getting crapped on by birds.
I have trained folks that I interact with regularly to schedule a call with me, preferably hours ahead. I prefer that one writes down the agenda for said call, so I can get all my excuses, explanations and half-truths in order. Randomly calling me out of the blue always feels like an ambush. This is especially true when you have a favour to ask me. Be decent enough to forewarn me because I’m inefficient at composing lies on the spot.
Let it never be said that I am not a hypocrite who does not practise what he preaches. At Cape Town International Airport recently I spotted an acquaintance walking by, some 20m away, as I browsed in Exclusive Books. Without warning, I whipped out my phone and called her. I watched her look at her phone for about two seconds. With the same facial expression my father had 30-odd years ago she calmly put her phone away and continued with her life. It warmed my heart to realise that I’m not alone on the anal-retentive side of life.
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