The title is an old western (film) cliche from when that genre existed. A few seconds later the unfortunate actor would be hit by an arrow between the shoulder blades and sink to the ground. I had that “too quiet” feeling about a month ago when I realised that I had not had a phone call for about a week. I had not tried to make a call either, but that is not unusual as looking at my monthly bill I only make about 4 or 5 calls a month and those are mostly in response to calls fielded by my answering machine. This probably does not reflect your own phone usage. I am of course talking about a landline and I do not have, or have ever had, a mobile phone.
Call me a dinosaur, a technophobe or whatever you like, but I simply don’t want a mobile. They are brilliant devices that give access to amazing amounts of information and will become a right-of-passage event when little kids have them implanted in their brains, but I don’t want one. I graduated with hons in engineering, follow Scientific American and astronomy sites and have built this website, so I don’t tremble in fear of technical stuff and complexity, I just don’t want a mobile.
I definitely didn’t have a phone way back when
I came to Possum Valley 43 years ago after travelling the world for 5 years with a backpack on the hippie trail. I met thousands of people from hundreds of cultures, so I claim not to be antisocial or introvert, but I don’t want a mobile. Gads, anyone could call me anytime! I don’t want that. I came from crowded England to remote north Queensland to buy a vacant rainforest property to have space and quietness for myself, with the very modest aims of creating a comfortable living space in a rich and natural environment far away from the hustle and bustle. I wanted to be a semi-hermit only occasionally and reluctantly crawling to civilization to get things I couldn’t grow or make. Then I got married and had kids. If you want to wreck your idealised lifestyle, that is the quickest way to do it. Don’t get me wrong, no regrets, it is the best thing I ever did, but it did require certain mental adjustments. Or a total reboot. Then after 5 years of blissful isolation, my wife got pregnant and thought it would be a good idea to have a phone. A pretty radical idea, but I couldn’t deny the safety considerations. So I applied to have a phone put on. Hang in there, I am gradually creeping round to the topic.
Back in to good old days, there was a standard connection fee of about $170. For this fee a city dweller would get a techie to connect a few wires with a little electrical screwdriver. I got a whole crew for a week with a D7 bulldozer, a ditchwitch and other heavy equipment to lay and bury 2 kms of wire over hill and dale and through a farm dam. I also leveraged that out to bury 200m of water pipe in their nicely cut trenches. I certainly got my money’s worth, but there was a sleeper problem in the phone line insulation. A certain sealing gunk used at that time proved to be deficient and water could seep into joints and corrode connections. A multi billion dollar problem for Telstra and a slightly smaller problem for me. In the wet season the connection pits fill up with water and the line has failed a couple of times before. It has taken up to 6 weeks to fix.
This time I think a week went by before I noticed nobody had called and I picked up the phone to find no dial tone. Then I went online to report the fault to Telstra but wherever I went on the massive site I was told to call this number or text this number. I only had email. My phone line was down but I could only report this by phone. Catch 22. I am 5km from my nearest neighbours who I don’t even know and would probably be an hour or two on hold anyway, so to borrow a phone would be a bit presumptuous. I finally found a little chink in the armour of the impregnable Telstra fortress as the only place to send an email was to ‘complaints’. So I complained. Days later I got a reply saying the account for that number was cancelled in 2015. WTF? I have been using the line for 37 years up until a few weeks ago when it failed to function. They asked for more info and I sent them heaps but to no avail. After 2 fruitless week I contacted my ISP Skymesh to ask them if perhaps they had stopped paying the Telstra bills, because for simplicity I had bundled the billing for the phone line rental and calls with them. Then I got some sense. They provide my internet connection from a satellite 32,000kms up in space and have nothing to do with copper wire buried underground, but I had to report the problem through them so they could “raise a fault” with Telstra. How silly of me. I had been thinking of techies with boots and shovels to fix a line fault when I should have contacted a satellite company, via satellite, to fix it.
This morning I picked up the phone in passing and there was a dial tone. I now have a working phone. I didn’t miss it much, and don’t think I missed much business, but I can now chat to my daughters again. I know the days for copper wire are numbered and it is relic technology, but I’m going to hang on to it for as long as possible. So I quite enjoyed my recent guaranteed days of uninterrupted self-indulgence, but also pleased to have the service back. There are also safety issues if I manage to cut a leg with one of my 6 chainsaws for instance. Would be comforting to know I could call an ambulance.
Amazing story Paul, now that I know you I can see your reasoning – You want peaceful bliss, and won’t get it with a mobile phone. They are invaders of decent privacy, there is no privacy full stop. You’re better as you are, even when the system fails, at least then you get even more blissful peace when the landline fails. I envy you, and yet these are the choices we make – we can all have much more peace and privacy just by chucking the thing into the ocean and forgetting there is such a device. It’s a herd response to have what everyone else has, and to fight that response is difficult in this day and age. I should make a stand now, but won’t, due to my friends’ expectations of me. I won’t let them down. So I suffer, where you do not, I ran with the herd, where you did not, I’ll continue to live up to my friends’ expectations of me, and sacrifice the peace I know I could, should, would have, by this simple deed.
I don’t like it it ….is too quiet
Sounds like a heavenly home
Call an ambo? OK if you’re wielding the chainsaw within a few feet of the fixed terminus of your phone line. But if as is more likely you’re taking even low risks of sudden immobility with work tools or projects remote from the phone, you’d need a decent, long-range domestic portable phone system, or even a pack of nice old-fashioned smokey-orange flares, carried at all such times.