The curse of the telephone

Since I joined work, there’s hardly been any time to devote time to the blog. Things have been quite hectic on the personal front as well. Even though Mumbai provides a lot of inspiration, I hardly have the energy to convert that inspiration into writing. For now, I’m posting a very interesting section from a book I’m currently reading. It matches my outlook of the telephone which is nothing but an instrument meant to disturb you and take over your life. I’ve realized this is true all the more after I restarted my work life, this time as a manager.

…Now just relax and imagine a less complicated world in which the phone has not yet been invented. In such a world, you write a note to propose lunch or a meeting and you get a note in response. Everyone plans ahead a little bit more. It’s common to take half an hour in the morning to read and answer your mail. There are no loud bells in your life.

Wednesday mornings in this alternate reality are dedicated to meetings of your company’s pension trust investment committee. Imagine for the moment you are one of the employee representatives charged with watching where the money is placed. On this particular Wednesday, an inventor is scheduled to make a presentation to the committee. The inventor has plans to change the world, if only you’ll invest in his new contraption. His name is A.G. Bell.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the BellOPhone!” (The man unwraps a large black box with a crank on the side and an enormous bell attached to the top.) ‘This is the future. We’re going to put one of these on every desk in America. Homes, too! It will get to the point where people can hardly imagine a world without them.” As he warms up to his subject, he begins gesticulating enthusiastically and hopping around the room to make his points. “BellOPhones everywhere you look, all of them hooked up together with wires under the street or overhead. And now this is the really
exciting part: You can get your BellOPhone specifically connected to somebody else’s BellOPhone, even though it may be all the way across the city or maybe in some other city. And when you’ve connected it just by entering the code, you can make the bell ring on the other fellow’s machine. Not just some rinky-dink bell, either, but a real heart-stopper.”

He sets up a second device and connects it to the first, on the other side of the room. By manipulating a dial on the face of the first, he causes the other machine to come alive. It gives off a loud BRRRRINNNNNNNGGGGGGG! After half a second, it rings again and then again and again, deafeningly.

“Now, what’s a fellow got to do to stop this ringing? He’s got to race over to his BellOPhone and pick up the receiver.” He picks up the receiver on the ringing device and hands it to one of the committee members. Then he bounds back to the other side of the room and starts shouting into the mouthpiece of the originating device. “Hello! Hello! Can you hear me? See that, I’ve got his complete attention. Now I can sell him something, or get him to lend me money or try to change his religion or whatever I want!” The committee is stunned. You raise your hand and venture a question, “Since nobody could possibly have missed the first ring, why bother to repeat it?” “Ah, that’s the beauty of the BellOPhone,” says A.G. “It never gives you the chance to wonder whether you want to answer it or not. No matter what you’re involved in at the time it rings, no matter how engrossed you are, you drop everything to answer it. Otherwise, you know it will just keep on ringing. We’re going to sell billions of these things and never ever allow any to be sold that
ring only once.”

The committee goes into a huddle, but it doesn’t take very long to come up with a judgment. You all decide without a dissenting voice to throw this turkey out the door. The device is so disruptive that if you were ever dumb enough to allow it to be installed, nobody would ever get any work done around the office. A few years’ effect of the BellOPhone and we’d all be reduced to buying goods from Taiwan and Korea. And our country might even have a negative balance of trade.

Of course, there’s no turning the calendar back.

This short story summarizes what the phone will ever be. Consider this situation – you are talking with someone, and suddenly the phone rings. How many of you would interrupt the conversation and pick up the phone? To answer someone who might be at the other end of the city, and to ignore (even for a few minutes) the person standing before you? 99 out of 100 people do that. Why do we give more importance to people on the phone than to people standing before us? How would you feel you’re standing in a line waiting to order pizza, and the person at the counter answers the phone to take a home delivery order? Things to think about.

Next post coming up in a few days, another of my pet peeves – meetings. What they were meant for, and what they are used for.

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