Switch 'em on

Our dependence on technology can be embarrassing. On a night out with the girls, I spotted a group of twenty-somethings walk into the pub in a line. The guys in front, making way through the crowd for the girls who, in a very mirror-image like fashion, were staring at their mobile phones as they followed the leader.

Were they ordering their drinks via SMS, Whatsapp, BBM, iChat or whatever chat application they favour, before they hit the bar? Did the pub know something that I didn’t? Almost by instinct, I looked down at my phone. No mails (for a change!) and no texts.

Then I remembered something. Of late, I get responses such as “I’ll message you on Whatsapp” instead of “I’ll call you”. I guess I have also done the same thing. One of the first things a close friend, who I was meeting after over a year, asked was if the restaurant we were sitting at had free Wi-Fi so she could log on to her chat. She was on international roaming and didn’t have data. Okay, maybe she needed to be online for some reason but I did consider taking her phone and hiding it.

But it also got me thinking. With the average age of mobile phone users rapidly decreasing, are service providers going mental? It could be the classic problem of demand versus supply, could it not? Why else would I be constantly battling with signal problems and why is the entire planet not Wi-Fi enabled already?

Each morning, I have to literally break into a jig as I swing from one room to the other looking for a bar or two so I could have a peaceful conversation. And it’s not even the right kind of bar that I am fighting for over here.

Incessant calls to customer care have convinced me that there is nothing wrong with my service and the problem lies within me. I have been led to believe that my internal electro-magnetic force prevents my mobile phones from working. Too bad.

It’s not a Bangalore thing fortunately. I just got news from a relative in Calcutta that her mobile phone service provider has employed angry wives as their customer care staff. “Oh, so you think if your outgoing is barred and it’s inconvenient, wait till we block your incoming as well.” This is from a 30-something woman to a 65-year-old.

I cannot afford to be angry. But I can afford to be amused. We need these phones. Not to text our boyfriends when we’re in a meeting or send line by line update to our girlfriends while we’re on a date. Well those too but most importantly, we need these phones because someone might want to reach out to us. Or we might need to send an urgent text/mail and this little device enables it.

What bothers me is that people like the ‘happy to help’ sorts are more concerned about the kind of caller back tune we should have and how many photos we can share with our million friends in less than a minute than what the mobile phone was originally intended for. But who’s going to tell them that?