Forty years ago I worked on a small provincial newspaper which was so poor that if we didn't get enough advertisements during the week we simply didn't get paid on Friday. We had a special salesman going around trying to get "prepaid" adverts. We couldn't give anyone credit and it had to be money on the nail. Not surprisingly, our little rag eventually went belly-up. We had a big "wake" to mark the end of the honourable little newspaper and that was the end of it. Such is life.
Before its demise, one of the big cost-saving strategies was to cut down telephone calls. Every call had to be logged in a big red ledger beside the heavy black phone in the newsroom. We weren't, by the way, logging long-distance calls, or trunk calls as they were known then. Every local call had to be diligently chronicled in the ledger.
No small talk
Luckily, soon after the collapse, I was able to get a job on a bigger paper. It's an ill wind, as they say . . . But, yet again, the phone was the target. My new employers insisted that all long-distance calls be put through the switchboard, thereby snuffing out any possibility of ringing your relations in America or South Africa. Big Brother was always watching. There wasn't going to be any small talk on that paper.
All this came back to me recently when I read an article by Alan Sugar, the computer tycoon, which showed how things have moved on. Nowadays, according to Sugar, staff don't waste time and money on phone calls, they spend hours on the Internet or sending and receiving e-mails. "One of our staff went totally and utterly off the rails and lost his marbles," Sugar said. "He became glued to this new technology and - without exaggeration - spent 60 per cent of his working day surfing the Net.
"In hindsight, it was easy to recognise the tell-tale signs of this modern disease. The fellow had lost control of his day-today work and was unable to answer simple questions about his job. When you passed by his desk it looked as though he was working diligently at his personal computer. I can recall every time I walked up behind him he would change the screen by hitting the Alt and Tab buttons at the speed of lightning. That in itself should have told all. Normally he was the kind of bloke you would tell to keep moving in Madame Tussaud's in case he was mistaken for a dummy."
What is the attraction of this constant need to communicate? Apparently nobody can relax nowadays without wanting to talk to or e-mail someone, anyone. They are talking confidentially to people they have never seen in their lives as though they were best friends - all for the sake of small talk. And it is all the more exciting to do it electronically.
Call from Pravda
Thirty years ago, I knew a journalist who never got off the phone and spent his time talking to everyone from one end of the globe to the other. He was addicted to the instrument, which eventually became an extension of his ear. The night of the historic debate in the Dail when Jack Lynch sacked Haughey and Blaney over allegedly importing arms, the phone rang in the press room. I answered it, but it was for my friend. The call was from Moscow. It was Pravda on the line. How they got his name I don't know. Back in 1970 the Iron Curtain was firmly in place and there was little contact between East and West and certainly not between Leinster House and the then Soviet Union. We were astounded that the Russians were watching us (it used to be the other way round, with the Skibbereen Eagle watching the Tsar). The heavy Russian accent at the other end of the line asked if there was a "crisis" in Ireland and was it correct that there had been "a coup d'etat?".
Times change. Every second person now has a mobile phone. Many kids have their own mobiles and can be seen on buses and in streets, heads back, phones glued to their ears, and shouting deliriously into their favourite toy. They are oblivious to the fact that those of us within a radius of a hundred yards have a life of our own and don't want to know about their arrangements for the weekend, or what happened at the party last night, or what they intend wearing to the wedding in April.
Modern-day scare
Recent reports that mobile phones can be dangerous to your health haven't worried anybody unduly. Just another modern-day scare, not to be taken seriously? Who knows? Colin Blakemore, Waynflete professor of physiology at Oxford University, claims they can cause short-term memory loss. In an interview in the Sun- day Times, he said there was now strong evidence of an adverse effect on "cognitive function, memory and attention". Mobiles were particularly dangerous, he contended, if used while driving. "You could turn the brain off, reducing attention to the road. The kind of radiation emitted by mobile phones can directly affect nerve cells and where you put the phone is very close to the areas involved in short-term memory."
Yes, we all love to talk, have a nice conversation, hear a bit of gossip, be in the company of good story-tellers, but why do some people feel they have to talk all the time. Do these people talk in their sleep? Is it a kind of disease? Are they afraid of silence? Are they not happy with their own company?
Or is it just me? I speak only when I'm spoken to or when I have something reasonably useful to say. Am I missing out on something in this life?