A creative work by Sharon Millow
My day has started badly! This is real end of the world stuff! I just can’t go on! My life as ended!
“What is it?” you may well ask? Is it terrorists, war, has a new strain of Covid been pumped into our atmosphere and we are all going to die a horrible painful death?
No, it’s worse than that. My mobile phone is dead! What am I going to do? My life is in that phone. I simply can’t go on!
I vaguely remember those days of long ago when such a thing was unheard of. A phone was something that sat on a bench and the numbers went round in a circle. They only made a voice call. Anything else was written down. To find out information one went to the library, which involved a bike ride of half an hour and lots of leg work.
When over the other side of the world, we’d have to write a letter or an aerogram, taking sometimes weeks to get to its destination. On very rare occasions I’d buy a £10 phone card and call on a public phone box which had buttons instead of screens, which wouldn’t last terribly long.
For many, many more years we were back to the simple home phone. My first job was at the telephone services of the New Zealand Post Office, where I would take phone calls about home phones where they may ask for an extra telephone connection and I would work out how much they would pay a using a pen and paper because the calculator was often wrong and my maths never failed.
A map was a big piece of paper or a big book, the worst of which was the Refidex.
My poor phone has been to visit a nice Asian man who told me my phone has crashed. How does that work? My phone doesn’t have wheels or a motor! $50 later and it has been reset and with a loud “Scooby Doo be do”, I know that it is alive! I am saved. All is right with the world.
