Nimby-Phone

There is a protest today in my road. A group of local people are objecting to plans by T-Mobile to put a mobile phone transmitter in the park at the top of the road. I won’t be going. I don’t like mobile phone masts, I’d rather there weren’t any, but since nearly everyone who objects to the masts also uses a mobile phone it seems like the most blatant hypocrisy for them to complain about being able to see them. I have visions of these campaigners marching up and down and then going home to complain to their phone operators about poor coverage.

It would be better if campaign groups like Mast Sanity would campaign against the use of mobile phones, but they don’t because they know it would be unpopular. I don’t have a mobile. Well, I do have one but it’s so old that it only works when it’s plugged in so it’s really just a phone.

There are several reasons why I don’t like mobile phones. The first is that they encourage people to be rude. Once that phone rings the owner almost always goes into a kind of selfish bubble in which everyone around them ceases to exist. I have witnessed people having all sorts of conversations that they wouldn’t have with a real person in public. It also makes me very sad to see a couple walking down the road, one of them chatting away on their phone to someone with whom they demonstrably would much rather be.

The second reason is that they encourage people to be disorganised. The adoption of ‘approximeeting’ seems to have made it much more acceptable to keep other people waiting. It is as if by constantly keeping their victim updated on their progress the latecomer can disguise the fact that the meeting simply wasn’t sufficiently important to justify allowing enough time to travel to it.

The last reason I dislike these phones is the way in which people see them as status symbols. I realised when I first saw an advert which asked “Are you ashamed of your mobile?” that I would never again buy a mobile phone. The fact that the people who sell these phones can shamelessly tell their customers that something they sold them last year is actually crap reflects very badly both on the salesmen and the saps who fall for this nonsense.

There is, in fact, only one thing I like about mobile phones and that is the German name for them. “I’ll call you on your Handy” they say. “Handy” is short for “Handy-phone”. Nice.