How do you know when it’s time? (From Bucks Free Press)

The end of an affair

8:53am Saturday 16th April 2011

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My phone and I have been together for some eight years on and off. I think it may be time to… well… move on.

There’s a sense of treachery verging on infidelity. If my phone could speak, it would be red-eyed and begging me:

“Please don’t let me go. I’ll try harder. I’ll be what you want me to be”

And I’d have to say something like,

“You’re just not… useful any more”

“Please let’s try again…”

But I think the signs are all too evident. It’s time to part.

The fact is that my mobile companion doesn’t work most the time. It doesn’t seem to function at the lowest level (i.e. ring when someone’s calling me).

Once I’m home again though it beeps and rings continually giving me signs that I have messages. Why didn’t it ring when I was out then?

It’s a Nokia the size of a Dictaphone. Like a barbecue briquette. It doesn’t take photos, video, play music and I can’t email on it.

The faintly green screen has two cracks in it – one horizontal the other from corner to corner; I can’t read texts any more as only the top half of messages appear.

When I’ve written, ‘Sounds good’ all I can see are the descenders of the letters – so two or three marks. Like a sort of new cipher.

I suppose my fear is that I won’t be able to operate anything else. Will I know how to answer a call? I fear not.

And then there’s the trouble of finding a pleasant ringtone – one that speaks to me personally. And another for the text tone. And what I want displayed on the screen. It could all take weeks. Personalising the thing.

A friend of mine was round a while ago and showed me her new phone. There wasn’t much it couldn’t do. Really I think there needs to be a new name for these things. Calling a number is one of the many, many things they do.

She laid it on my rug. I worried about possible crumbs that might get into it. These things are delicate.

She asked me where north was. I pointed north. She said ‘No, that can’t be north’. Unbelievably her phone had a compass in it. ‘Sometimes you have to shake it to reset it.’

Then I think of how to dispose lovingly of my Nokette. Bin? Donation? Should I even bother sending it away in the hope of getting some money for the gold inside it?

The thing is, my phone has me all over it. They were my fingers that erased the letters from the keys. I cracked the screen – I’ve dropped it more than a dozen times – on concrete too. And, even more personal, I knitted a case for it only last month. A phone sock as my family like to call it. My own mother wrinkled her nose when she saw it: ‘No. I don’t like that.’

More than a car or a TV or a house I’ve moved out of, this phone is very much me. Clumsy and dated, practical and basic.

I suppose it’s the reason why civilised people don’t hang on to or even acquire material things. Somehow they take on a bit of us and then we have to dispose of them along with a bit of us too.

“Good bye, Nokette.”

“It’s been wonderful – even the bad times. Like wiping me with a sopping J-cloth and losing me in someone else’s car for two weeks… It took you a week to reaslise I was gone…”

Well maybe I could carry on for just another few months…

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