The age of mobility
By
Until a few years ago, mobile phones were solid, black coloured instruments, all having the same in elegant design, made of ebonite, and distributed by the P&T to aid communication. The extent of its "mobility" depended on the length of the cord to which it was attached, allowing it to be carried from one end of the room to the other, or from one room to the next, depending on room size.
Then came the cordless telephone, which allowed the proud owner to make or take a call anywhere around the house, even in the garden, as long as it was sufficiently close to the phone’s "home base." The snag was (and still is) that this home base would only work when NEPA was working. So the cordless phone often stayed deaf and mute.
Somewhere along the way pagers were introduced, to be used going by the advertisement I saw for telling the subscriber that he should "call the maternity hospital immediately; your wife has just had a baby boy." Since, for most people, that sort of thing can happen only once every eleven months or so, a pager’s utility may be said to be rather limited.
I have also seen a variant of the pager that produces just a buzz. A few years ago one of my friends used to carry one around, attached to his belt. Its sole purpose was to alert his driver that he was on his way to the car.
Then came the real "mobile" which for a long time served as a status symbol. Small and getting smaller, it was something to be whipped out and held to the head in the oddest places and at the oddest moments.
Now we have what has come to be known as GSM, that promises to make the mobile phone no longer such a status symbol. The auction recently conducted by the Nigerian Communications Commission has been adjudged a resounding success, as much because of the revenue it yielded to the Federal Government, as because of its "openness."
Not everyone, I regret to say, is overjoyed at the thought of the looming telecommunication explosion. Certainly not this gentleman I met at lunch the other day. He had been toying with his food, having apparently lost his appetite. Then he suddenly startled me by asking: "Do I look paranoid?"
I examined him closely. He did look worried, but that is not always a sign of paranoia. "How do you feel?," I asked.
"Scared. It is this prospect of half the population having access to cellular phones that bothers me."
He had probably been listening to some scare stories about cellular phones radiating something that scrambles the users’ brain. Whole books have even been written on the subject.
"You don’t have to worry your head about that," I did my best to reassure him. "A Nigerian doctor has already taken care of that."
I told him about a young Nigerian doctor who runs a hospital at Ilupeju, and who once tried to market what he advertised as the antidote to the mobile phone syndrome. It was pink coloured liquid, and came in bottles. Placed on a nearby table when the mobile phone was in use, the pink liquid was supposed to take care of the radiation or whatever other bad vibes may be coming from the phone.
"Has the doctor become a billionaire yet?" my friend asked.
"Not yet. He has table problem. The bottle has to be on a table, you see, and he hasn’t been able to figure how to get a table to most of the places where mobile phones are most useful — on golf courses, on beaches, in taxis, out in the desert or jungle, or on a scaffolding at a construction site. As soon as he gets that little problem solved he will start making money.
My friend, who had perked up for a moment, sank back into his gloom. "It’s not only the radiation that I am worried about," he said. "There are all those other possibilities that will open up as soon as mobile phones get to the grassroots."
We spent the rest of an extended lunch hour talking about some of those other possibilities, and at the end it was difficult to tell which of us was more paranoid. Here are some samples:
The mobile phone has been referred to as the taxi driver’s phone — and that was my friend’s first area of concern. "If I get into a taxi and, after telling the driver my destination I see him pick up a cell phone and begin to speak into it, I’ll open the door and jump out."
"He may only be checking to see what traffic conditions are like along the route ahead," I said.
"Or," my friend said, "he may be arranging a rendezvous with some men who would then waylay me somewhere along that same route ahead."
I was beginning to see what he meant by being paranoid. "What other possibilities can you think of?"
"At the market I approach the gari seller and ask her what is her asking price for a bowl of gari. Before she answers she first picks up her mobile phone and calls a number. After a brief, cryptic conversation with whoever is at the other end she turns to me and says: "One hundred Naira." That would be the end of competition, because that brief call would have been to the president of the gari cartel. The gari cartel, next to the butchers’ cartel, is the most efficient price fixing organization after OPEC."
I thought he had a point there, having suffered at the hands of the beer cartel myself. But nothing he had said so far could be considered a strong argument against the spread of mobile phone ownership.
"Anything else?" I asked.
"Yes. Just imagine that it is the shopper who has a mobile phone and is careless enough to take it with her to the market. Just as she has managed to give the butcher the impression that she is the wife of a retired railway worker who hasn’t been paid his pension for two years, the wretched phone at the bottom of her shopping bag begins to ring. The butcher will immediately restore the forty Naira he was about to shave off the price of the chunk of beef the woman was going to buy.
"Maybe one shouldn’t take a mobile phone to the butcher’s stall," I agreed.
"Okay, now think of this other situation. You are at a musical recital where (just to take an example) T-Mac is playing the second movement of Mozart’s Flute Concerto No 2 in D. Then a mobile phone suddenly begins to ring, and the embarrassed owner has to step on several toes as he rushes out to the foyer to take the call."
"That would probably be more tolerable than taking the call right there in the recital hall," I said.
"I supposed so," my friend nodded, and then veered off in another direction. "One of the things I don’t like about mobile phones is this caller identification device some of them have. It’s going to mess up creditor-debtor relationship."
"How?" I asked, not knowing what a caller identification device was.
"I’ll explain. Your tenant is owing you two year’s rent. You phone him to make your weekly demand, and what happens? In the old days, with a landline he would innocently pick up his phone, and you then tell him to pay up or else. He may try to wriggle out by disguising his voice and telling you that he’s out of town, but you can still let him have a piece of your mind. It doesn’t get you your rent, but it makes you feel a bit better. Now things are going to be different."
"How?"
"Okay. When your tenant’s mobile phone rings, the caller identification device shows your telephone number, so he knows it is you calling. He presses a switch on his mobile phone, and the next thing you hear is a recorded voice telling you: The area you’re calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later."
"And if you try again later?"
"You hear the same voice repeating the same recorded message."
"Is there no end to the problems a mobile phone can cause?" I asked, amazed.
"None," my friend gloomily assured me. "And, to continue with my story, it is unwise to carry a mobile phone into a buka, because if it rings while you are bending over a plate of amala and ewedu, either of two things may happen. You may be mistaken for an investigator from the Department of Statistics compiling data for this week’s consumer price index - in which case everyone in that buka would want to tell about how crushing the burden of inflation is. Or you may be written off as a miserly top executive scrimping on the generous lunch allowance you are paid by your employers."
"All right," I said, "no mobile phones at Mama Put. Where then can one use a mobile phone without causing some problem or getting into trouble?"
"Not at parties — certainly not after reading that story about the armed robbery suspect who stole his victim’s mobile phone because armed robbers like to attend parties and be seen carrying mobile phones around. It makes them look important, and no one ever suspects that they are there to check out likely prospects to be trailed home from the party and robbed."
"So the widespread ownership of mobile phone is going to cause nothing but problems?" I asked.
My friend thought about that over for a moment before saying: "Well, it may actually solve one problem. You know how some people have this habit of talking to themselves while taking a solitary walk down the street? And how it gets them curious stares from passers-by, who think they’ve got a screw loose? Well, a mobile phone can stop people staring at such a person. All he has to do is take out his mobile phone and hold it to his head every time he feels like talking to himself. Then he can talk as much as he likes, and no one will think he is crazy."