HOLD THE PHONE

First day of a fresh month, the countdown is on to the end of the year, and Hinch has had an epiphany.

A life-changing swerve that will not only affect the rest of this year but the years ahead. And it started in the shower.

My mobile phone rang. As usual, like Pavlov’s dog, I almost dived to answer it. From habit I would have jumped out of the shower, dripping wet, grabbed the phone, told the caller I was wet and naked and would call them back and then gone back to my ablutions.

This time I didn’t. I ignored the phone’s urgent bleating. As a veteran journo I suppressed the urge to dive on it – in case it was Harold Holt – and figured that any important caller would leave a message on my expensive answering machine.

This breakthrough, to reclaim a piece of my life, came at the same time that I decided I would no longer spend hours a night answering e-mails.

Like many laptop losers, I had become a slave to this insidious world. Two or three hours a night would be spent hunched over the laptop bashing out replies to hundreds of e-mails. It got me thinking. If twenty letters land on your desk one day do you instantly abandon all other work to rip them open and answer them? Not bloody likely. So why do it with e-mails?

Before the Internet and electronic messaging, who spent hours every night at home answering business mail? Nobody. And yet with e-mails we feel guilty if one sits unanswered in the Inbox for 24 seconds, let alone 24 hours.

I am revolting. If you’ll excuse the expression. I have 278 unanswered messages in my Inbox and I could no longer give a tinker’s cuss. I will deal with them when I feel like it. Recently, by mistake (and maybe a Freudian slip) I accidentally deleted a couple of hundred unanswered e-mails. My cupboard, briefly, was deliciously bare.

This same, formerly foreign to me, renegade behaviour applies to the ubiquitous, intrusive, pervasive, mobile phone.

Why must it be answered on demand? We are such slaves to the strident ring that people stop, mid-sentence, at lunch to take a call. A table of four businessmen (or women) will feature three hanging off mobile phones. Interrupting fellow guests mid-sentence to kowtow to a call.

People treat an incoming mobile call with more importance than the words of the person they are sitting with. And that is rude. That is disgusting.

Imagine those pre-mobile days. Imagine if, mid-conversation, two luncheon guests suddenly got up, walked outside, strode up and down and talked to somebody who wasn’t there? It is telephonic madness. But it is apparently acceptable. Well, not to me any more.

That is why, as a person as guilty as anybody, I am changing my Mobile Phone Rules.

I won’t answer my mobile phone any more just because somebody called me. Just because it rang. I have a Monty Python example of my slavish devotion to the mobile beast.

As a passenger in a car, I would go through frantic Houdini-style contortions to try to get my mobile phone out of a pocket while physically restricted by a seat belt. The angst was palpable. Why? Big deal! You missed a call. Who cares? Many of us have risked hefty fines by answering the mobile while driving without a hands-free speaker. Why? Your caller won’t pay the fine. And it may not even be anybody you want to talk to.

We have become obsessed with our mobiles – or “cell phones” as they call them in the US and New Zealand. You are never more than a few seconds away from people getting in touch with you. You may as well be in a cell.

I guess, on the plus sign, it must have cut down on the number of extra-marital affairs. How do you explain to your partner why your mobile was off for four hours while you were in a motel with Betty Boop. Mobiles mean people know where you are EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY.

My new anti- mobile, anti e-mail, experiment has already delivered some stunning results. I have garnished this electronic “spring clean” by turning off the TV for several hours every night. The hours when I would sit, half-watching the idiot box while answering the flood of e-mails. I still sluice the brain by watching an hour of CSI or something. And then I turn it off and do something different.

By locking off, and taking some time for myself, I have actually replaced it with a quaint, old-fashioned thing called reading. I have just read veteran foreign correspondent Desmond Zwar’s book called “The Queen, Rupert and Me” and have broken the back of Bill Clinton’s 900-page “My Life”.

Next is Conrad Black’s huge tome on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then John Dean’s Worse Than Watergate. (I read at the weekend that the written word will have disappeared in fifty years but that is a different story. And a perturbing one at that when I have just signed a new contract for a new book).

But back to e-mails and mobiles. It is time to seize the night. Banish them for a few hours a day. I asked myself: what happened to the Hinch adage, proclaimed in semi-jest, that “all mail answers itself”? Or “If you haven’t got an answer then you already have”.

I have finally decided: Ozemail will not dominate or defeat THIS Aussie male.

August 1, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004