Barry Clifford: PEBKAC

                                             

Dialling 999 is the phone call that no one would wish to make and today it is more likely to be made by a mobile phone. The problem for many it is the mobile phone that had caused the emergency in the first place, and for others it has the  power to kill or save a life.

With features on our phone today that would have been the envy of many a space station just a few decades ago, makes the trusty cellular phone a must have with ever more demand for something even better, and just when it seemed that it could not be any more sophisticated along comes a new app or feature to boggle the mind. It has become an old friend, our book club, an instant messenger, and an irritant if you do not want to be found but cannot bring yourself to turn it off. And Facetime might not be a good idea if you are having an affair or down in the pub when you had promised to bring your partner out for that special dinner. Still it is something that we want to live and love with that be without.

When the cellular phone came out first it was comical to see people talking into a phone when there was no one else at the other end of it. Others stared at it with a telepathic hopefulness that it would ring, and when it did not they felt that they were unloved or less of a person or just plain lonely. In Columbia people drove around in their cars or bicycles with their mobile phones to their ears, except these devices were made of wood. It was not a breakthrough technology just a clever veneer imitation of a mobile phone such was the wish to look cool or rich.

Today mobile phones can be included as a freebie if you order an extra portion of French fries or two large size pizza’s instead of one, and often the reception is better with these than the sleek lined expensive designer brands. The latter carry Facebook to make us feel loved with hundreds if not thousands of friends online at any one time even though it suspends reality that you would be lucky if you have just one. Caring is sharing or so they buy into, and yet it drives teenagers on the cusp of living to despair when acceptance seems the most important thing in life and anything less can mean death by their own hand.

Texting has taken the well crafted words of the ages handed down by learned scribes, artists, and writers to the level of the short utterances of uneducated apes. The energy it takes to write ‘you’ replaced by ‘u’ underlining the hurry in going nowhere fast and the texting acronym for ‘Problem exists between keyboard and chair’ is PEBKAC makes the English language beloved by Shakespeare and his fan club all but dead. Where will it all end?

Barry Clifford