A recurring discussion point around our office, especially at times of mobile contract renewal, is which is the better: Blackberry or Google Android (NB: iPhones don’t figures as we won’t pay the extra premium).
My answer? You guys do not know how lucky you are!
When I started my sales careers in the late 80’s I was given a pager, which beeped and vibrated periodically when the office wanted me. The rule was that I had to call in within 20 minutes of being paged, however with due respect to the North West’s second city could anyone in that period ever find a phone box in Liverpool that hadn’t been vandalised?! By the time I managed to call in I was invariably in trouble for taking far longer than the requisite 20 minutes and subsequently late for my next appointment.
From this point we moved on in sophistication to the car phone. Anyone remember that particular advancement which was going to be the enduring highpoint of communications technology – clearly the Carphone Warehouse thought so when naming their business?! Firstly you had a hole drilled through the roof of your car to affix an aerial, which you had to remember to remove before going through a car wash, only to discover that analogue hands free at 80mph is totally useless so most driving was carried out one handed, tangled in wire.
Soon, if you were senior enough, you progressed to the ultimate status symbol the ‘mobile’ phone. I have placed mobile in inverted commas because how truly mobile were those huge hunks of mettle with the battery life of a clockwork mouse and a signal strength that made any conversation of more than 30 seconds duration virtually impossible. If you want a bit of nostalgia tune into the film Pretty Woman to see Richard Gere, richer than Rockerfeller, a brilliant pianist, built like an Adonis and all round Master of the Universe, speaking into his phone the size of a small truck with an aerial that is too high to pass under low bridges. Priceless.
So the next time you are shouting either at your mobile because it has dropped a call, my Android does everything brilliantly other than make phone calls for which it is useless, or into your mobile in a restaurant or on a train (why must people do that?) remember where we have come from and be glad you don’t only have a pager!. On the other hand restaurants and trains were a little quieter in those days.
Duncan Palfreyman
