DON'T HANG UP

10 CC's classic album  How Dare You from 1976 featured "Don't hang up" and other great songs. The Godley/Creme videos bench marked the art at the time and the album covers like the one above were innovative and striking.

Did they know that they were prescient?

Nowadays it seems that no one is hanging up, much to the glee of telecommunication companies. Everywhere I go I see people talking into, talking at, typing into, fiddling with or otherwise playing/using cellular phones in their many guises. In a Toronto newspaper the other week the statistics of pedestrian fatalities and injuries were published and there was an indecently high percentage of victims who were hit/maimed/ killed while texting or talking into a hand held device. On the subway the percentage of young people who use their phones while travelling is about 90% (from observations I've made). The first thing that they do is text, scan photos , make calls or listen to music. On the streets the percentage is slightly less but this is where the real danger is. It is quite the usual thing to have some young thing charging along, narrowly missing people on the footpath (sidewalk) and being narrowly missed by cars on the road while they are texting/phoning/listening. Some are oblivious to how loud they are talking and carry on intimate conversations at full volume. The ones that get to me are people who have those annoying blue tooth contraptions fitted to their ears and have the phone in a pocket. They carry on loud conversations seemingly to themselves. This can be a bit disconcerting when shouting is involved as you are never sure if they aren't one of the non-committed loonies that big cities have roaming around sans medication. Whilst not as bad as San Francisco which must have the highest number of brain-fried damaged people per capita, Toronto as a city of many millions of people has its fair share.

To be fair, I have joined the ranks of lemmings who support telecommunication companies as I upgraded my 12 year old Nokia for an iPhone 5.

The iPhone 5 has all sorts of marvellous wizardry in addition to phone and text capability. The Nokia provided me with phone and text capability. I used the Nokia mainly to capture phone messages and to receive (and sometimes send) the odd text. I am using the iPhone 5 (after a period of experimentation with e-mails, internet trawling, GPS navigation, news updates etc) for capturing phone messages and  receiving (and sometimes sending) the odd text.

The phone has a damn good camera however and, as Toronto is a flat city with no major landmarks, has a very useful built-in compass. The monthly payments (with the rent to buy built-in) including unlimited phone calls and texts and a huge amount of data is less than I was paying in NZ for just calls and texts so it can't all be bad.

Next step for me might be to get a blue tooth earpiece and join the other loonies.