Talk to the Hand

by Lynne Truss

  To me, the delight of people answering or making calls is that they suddenly – and oblivious to the enforced eavesdropping – reveal enormous amounts about themselves, as if they had, under the influence of hypnosis, stood up on a table and started stripping, and then, just as suddenly, got down again, adjusted their clothing, and resumed the anonymity of the everyday humdrum passenger. Of course, I have overheard – and resented – banal, annoying, and even obscene mobile calls. A friend of mine travelling from Victoria to Brighton was obliged to overhear all the arrangements for the felonious handover of counterfeit money (“That last lot was like bog paper!” the bloke yelled, striking terror in all his fellow passengers). I once stood in misery in a taxi queue while a huge drunk man behind me bellowed a rather vile account of the evening’s sexual exploits (“I said to her, ‘No nails, love! No nails! The wife’ll Effing kill me!’ ”). But on the whole, I rather welcome the chance it gives us to overhear other people’s business. And of course one day I’ll hear someone standing outside Waterloo station saying, “Yes, Istanbul is so magical in the springtime!” and it will make me very happy.

  But just because I find it quite interesting doesn’t mean that it isn’t yet another symptom of our almost insane levels of self-absorption. The trouble is, the telephone has always had the ability to distract us from our duty to our surroundings; it is, quite simply, an anti-social instrument. When you are talking to someone face-to-face and the phone interrupts you, you can be as polite as you like about it (“Excuse me, do you mind, I’m sorry”), but it’s still a snub to the person present. I used to visit a friend in her office, and would often go through a very painful pantomime when she answered the phone, because she would launch into an animated conversation immediately, but when I mimed a discreet “I’ll go, then”, she would wave and frown at me, insisting I stay, and roll her eyes exaggeratedly at how annoying it was to be on the phone to this total bore, all the while laughing and chatting, and giving no verbal indication that she had someone present in her office and therefore ought to cut it short. “And then what?” she would ask, beckoning me back as I tried to escape. “No! Really? I’ve always thought that about him!” I would writhe in agony at how rude she was being to me, how rude she was being to the other person (who didn’t know), and how miserable I was, having to listen to all this. Imagine calling her up, after witnessing scenes like this. “Is this a bad moment?” I would ask. “Is there anyone there? Who’s there? I bet there’s someone there!” “No, of course there isn’t!” she would assure me, but I still imagined her scribbling my name on a piece of paper, pushing it across the desk, and miming being sick down a lavatory.

  When people look for a piece of technology to blame for modern manners, it is often television that cops the lot, but we forget what an impact the telephone had when it was first introduced. With the advent of the phone, people could choose to conduct real-time private conversations with people who weren’t there. Having grown up with universal telephone technology, we find this idea pretty unremarkable, but Carolyn Marvin’s fascinating book When Old Technologies were New (1988) points out that there were considerable fears in the last quarter of the nineteenth century about the impact the telephone would have – quite common-sense fears, actually, that mainly came true, and that neatly parallel our current concerns about the internet. The telephone was an instrument for speaking to someone who couldn’t see you, and who could be many miles away. It cut through normal social etiquette. Because of these factors, it would make people more confiding and open, but also less civil, less deferential, and less honest. It would facilitate crime. Children would become furtive, anti-social, and uncontrollable. Young people could make assignations with it. None of this seems ridiculous or alarmist to me, incidentally, except perhaps for the warning from the editor of a Philadelphia newspaper in 1894 who cautioned his readers “not to converse by phone with ill persons for fear of contracting contagious diseases”.

  The impact of the phone on the “proprieties of presence” was immediately worrying. People spoke more freely on the telephone. Women gossiped on it. Formerly, there was a code for speaking when at home, and a code for speaking when outside the home. Both codes were posited on observing the presence of others and the etiquette of the surroundings. But the phone was one-to-one, and neither indoors nor outdoors, and the four walls of domestic privacy were breached for ever. “The home wears a vanishing aspect,” lamented Harper’s in 1893. Carolyn Marvin quotes from The Times in 1897 the astonishingly modern prediction, “We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other.” She also quotes, from the same year, a presentation by W. E. Ayrton to the British Imperial Institute which exactly predicted the weirdness of the mobile phone, anticipating it by about a century:

  When a person wants to telegraph a friend, he knows not where, he will call in an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear, but will be silent to everyone else, he will call, “Where are you?” and the reply will come loud to the man with the electromagnetic ear, “I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Pacific.”

  My point is, we have to place our annoyance at the mobile phone in this context. For over a hundred years, we have been pretty useless at juggling the relative claims of the there and the not-there. Perhaps that’s why we are so miserable about the way people now use mobiles in public: it reminds us that we didn’t deal with this problem adequately when it first arose. We let things slide. We pretended it didn’t matter. We loved the phone too much to care. But phones have always obtruded; they have always trapped us in their tracker beams and transported us instantaneously to another planet. A phone conversation, being both blind and one-to-one, is a more intense and concentrated form of communication than talking face-to-face. Inevitably, then, when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate – with quite elaborate behaviours – for the sudden half-disappearance of the person we were just speaking to. “Go ahead!” we say. “Don’t mind us! Oh look, here’s a magazine I can read!” When the call is over, other rituals come into play, to minimise the disruption caused, and to restore good feeling. “Oh, it was your mother, was it? Well, I wondered, naturally, but I wasn’t really listening.”

  And now people are yelling, “So I said to her, no nails!” or “That last lot was like bog paper!” down their mobile phones in public places, and we don’t know what to do about it besides boil and seethe. If only you could ignore it. In fact, why can’t you ignore it? Do you see how the person sitting next to the caller – their boyfriend, their mum – is usually quite happily gazing out of the window or doing a word-search puzzle? Why are they so unaffected? Isn’t that a bit perverse of them? What’s going on?

  Well, let’s say you are with someone you know, at his house or in his office, and he has to take a phone call. A void opens up, doesn’t it? It’s a kind of limbo. A positive becomes, as it were, a temporary negative. You were plus a person; now you are minus a person. While the phone call unfolds, you sympathetically adopt a minus position yourself. When it’s over, and you get the person back, you both become positive again (i.e. both are present and aware of each other).

  But when the person who goes on the phone is a stranger, it’s entirely different. In a train compartment where all are strenuously activating their feeble force fields, the void, the limbo, is implicitly agreed to be the desired state of all. Then the phone rings, a young woman answers it, and a bizarre thing happens: she duly absents herself from her surroundings, but the result is not a double negative, as you might suppose. She becomes a positive! “Ange! I was gonna phone ya! Wha’ appened? Djoo gow off wiv im?” Yes, two negatives make an intensely annoying positive! Not only that, but her sudden vivid presence demands that everyone else become positive too, hanging on every word. It’s awful. The old healing rituals don
’t apply in this situation, since there is no conciliatory “Do you mind?” beforehand, or explanatory “That was my mother” afterwards. And a different, unsatisfactory kind of positive is achieved, in any case. You are now intensely aware of this intensely present woman. “Yer, well, she’s a slag in’t she?” But of course she is not remotely aware of you.

  ! # * !

  Why don’t we object more often? Why is advice on this issue always facetious, unrealistic, and only weakly amusing?

  “Switch on a tape recorder and place it in front of the person speaking. They will soon shut up.”

  “Note down their number and call it immediately, pretending to be someone from the office.”

  “When they have loudly broadcast their address and credit card details, text this information to them with the accompanying message, For God’s sake, we can all hear you, shut up.”

  “Wait for the call to finish, then go over and start talking to the user, but just mouth the words.”

  “Pick up their phone and throw it out of the window.”

  There are many reasons why we don’t do these things. Ingrained politeness and fear of reprisal are prominent among them. Also, any fair-minded person is bound to ask, “Why am I taking this personally? I know perfectly well that it’s not personal.” So we grumble and sigh and fidget, and occasionally catch the eye of another passenger similarly fed up, because we feel that a public space should be neutral and shared. We don’t want to dominate it ourselves; we just don’t want anyone else to dominate it, either – and the idea of people being able to tune in to telly stations on the underground drives me close to despair. In that New York Times story of the business-reply envelope guerrilla, there is a tantalising reference to illegal hand-held “jammers” that can block all phone signals in a forty-five-foot radius; also a gadget called “TV-B-Gone”, which can switch off televisions, rather as the name implies. I am urgently in the market for both these wonderful inventions – especially if they operate secretly, as I am getting quite bold (not to say stroppy) in this regard already, and am generally asking for a punch in the face. I now automatically ask taxi drivers to switch off their annoying talk radio; at the self-storage warehouse, where a pop channel is left blaring amid the units for the supposed entertainment of the patrons, I just march in and unplug the hi-fi; at Broadcasting House, if I am waiting alone in reception, I switch off Radio 2. When I am thwarted in my mission to restore neutral quiet to public areas, by the way, I get quite confused. “Anyone listening to this?” I said the other day in the dentist’s waiting-room, finger already poised above the “Off” button (which wasn’t easy, as the hi-fi was fixed quite high up on the wall). “Yes, I am,” said a woman. I was completely taken aback. If she hadn’t looked pained and swollen, I think I would have called her a liar.

  Back with the mobile phone, however, I have started to think that the rudeness is not in answering them, because answering a ringing phone is a kind of conditioned reflex that few of us can resist. I am beginning to think it is much more rude to call one. I find that people I’ve never spoken to before are increasingly choosing to call me on my mobile before even checking whether I am at my desk. They then leave a message involving a lot of numbers that I’m in no position to write down. Since my mobile doesn’t work properly indoors (insufficient signal), it will merely indicate that I have a message. Sighing and muttering, I have no choice but to put some shoes on, leave the house, climb a hill, and pace up and down with my eyes closed and my fist to my head. Then I come back downhill, come indoors, grab a pen and paper, go up the hill again and listen again, taking notes. When I finally get back indoors again, huffing and fuming, I reach for the phone and discover that, while I’ve been outside doing this Grand Old Duke of York impression for the neighbours, the bastards have called me at my desk as an afterthought.

  The most touching aspect of that 1897 prediction about the electromagnetic voice communicating with the electromagnetic ear is that the voice cries out, “Where are you?” and the reply comes, so splendidly, “In the Andes!” This, of course, is the key to the universal jumping-up-and-down reaction to “I’m on the train.” Surely a technology so miraculous deserves to convey communication that’s a bit less banal? Other people’s overheard conversations fall into four categories, it seems to me, and each carries its own objection:

  business conversations that, in an office setting, would be conducted behind closed doors;

  intimate conversations that ought to be conducted behind closed doors;

  humdrum domestic arrangements which would keep perfectly well for later; and 4 dross.

  All these types are uncomfortable to listen to. But it’s hard to see what can be done. On the one hand, it is a natural thing in humans to communicate. Putting the mobile phone in context, with the birth of each new form of communication technology (the penny post, the postcard), there has been a similar explosion of superfluous usage, just for the hell of it. On the other hand, however, the inconsiderateness is a proper cause for concern, and in particular it highlights a new development of relations in public: that group pressure no longer operates in the way that it once did. Formerly, a person might weigh it up: I want to do this anti-social thing, but there are twenty other people here, so I won’t. The calculation now is different. I want to do this anti-social thing, and if anyone objects, I’ll tell him to Eff Off. I can bank on him not getting support from other people, incidentally, because that’s the way things are.

  The Eff-Off reflex is where we will pick up the story of modern rudeness in the next chapter. But in the meantime, there was one particular point from those news stories I want to pick up. Of course, I’m hoping that other people share my reaction to those stories, which is, broadly:

  The schoolgirl story Reaction: outrage; bit of teeth-grinding; “Not in my day”, etcetera

  Virginia banning low-slung jeans Reaction: knee-jerk despair at reactionary legislation, followed by honest anxiety about my politics because, actually, I’m a bit sick of seeing young people’s underwear as well

  Television on the tube Reaction: gloom; Cassandra-ish tearing of hair; searching on internet for “TV-B-Gone” and other gadgets

  The small revenges story Reaction: supportive cheering; resolve to buy strips of sheet metal and clear all other work from routine

  Dealing with doorstep callers by ingenious means Reaction: slightly louder supportive cheering; resolve to practise “Quick! I tied him to a kitchen chair but he’s wriggling free!”

  People are losing the ability to concentrate Reaction: self-righteous nodding and arm-folding; muttering of, “I told you so”, followed by, “Hang on, what are we talking about, I’ve forgotten.”

  “Whatever happened to consideration?” we cry. Well, the prerequisite of consideration is the ability to imagine being someone other than oneself, and that’s a bit of a lost cause. For me, the detail that springs out and alarms me most from the news stories at the start of this chapter is the word “tolerant” in the London Underground report. “We will focus on education instead,” said a spokesman. “People need to be told to be tolerant, so we will be running ads similar to those found on overground trains.” The spokesman is, I think, suggesting that those who make calls or watch TV in a crowded Northern Line carriage should be considerate of other passengers; oddly, however, he uses the word “tolerant” instead.

  Why? Well, it is possible that he just has a small vocabulary, but it’s still a significant slip. From his point of view, you see, the nuisance-makers will soon be the ones operating within their rights. Therefore, if trouble is to be avoided, the nuisance-makers are the ones who must be tolerant; they must exercise saintly forbearance when they find people around them shouting, “Turn that Effing thing off! Turn that Effing thing off! It’s driving me Effing mad!” Being tolerated by selfish people who don’t understand that they’re in public may be the final straw for some of us. We may have no alternative – and I didn’t want to get quite so gloomy when I’m only half-way
through the book – but we may have no alternative but to stay home and bolt the door.

  THE FOURTH GOOD REASON

  THE FOURTH GOOD REASON The Universal Eff-Off Reflex

  The world has changed a lot since the Hungarian-born George Mikes published his classic work How to be an Alien in 1946. What he observed about the British in those early post-war days was our habit of reserve, irony, and understatement; our determination to avert unpleasantness mainly by ignoring it. J. B. Priestley famously lamented that the difficulty of writing plays about the non-confrontational English is their refusal to “make a scene”. Mikes, in his chapter “How to be Rude”, nailed this trait beautifully.

  If someone tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark, “You are a liar, Sir, and a dirty one at that.” In England you just say “Oh, is that so?” Or “That’s rather an unusual story, isn’t it?”

  Turned down for a job as a translator, for which he was completely unqualified, Mikes was told, “I am afraid your English is somewhat unorthodox.” He found this hilarious. In any other European country, he says, the equivalent brush-off would have taken the form of calling to the commissionaire, “Jean, kick this gentleman down the steps!” The proper British way is, in the words of Arnold Bennett, “always to behave as if nothing has happened, no matter what has happened”. We esteem it our highest national virtue that we can look back on a day of total disaster and say, “Well, I think that went pretty well, don’t you?”