Sitting in the garden on a sunny Sunday with the family, burger and beer in hand, I, a child of the 80s, have come to the realisation that for all the “back in my day…” stick I give the generation that came after mine, have, in fact, become more reliant on technology than I recognised.
It is true that back in my day, I couldn’t just watch any TV show whenever I wanted, and when I did, I had to sit through the ads and wait a whole week for the next episode. It is also true that for most of my life, music ‘playlists’ were created using physical tape, a pencil, some Sellotape, and a hell of a lot of patience.
What’s more, instead of Grammarly, we had Clippy. Instead of ChatGPT, we’d copy our mates’ homework, and instead of Contacts, we had our brains. I, for one, to this day, know most of my friends’ phone numbers as was true in 1993. However, as we sat there trying to teach my 6-year-old to memorise my mobile number in case of emergencies, I realised that my number is really the only currently active number I have stored in my brain.
Since getting my first mobile phone (the mighty Maxton MX-3204), all the numbers I ever needed have been stored in a big-then-small-then-big-again device. In all the years that had passed since that joyful Christmas when I opened the thing that changed many of our lives, it never occurred to me that the sacred art of memorising phone numbers should continue to be practised.
There was a time I knew my house number, but then I moved out, and my parents moved house and got a new number. I used to know my work office number, but I no longer work there. I can’t think of any other numbers I’ve memorised since the year 2000.
So, as it stands, if I were to lose or break my phone and require some form of immediate assistance, the only number I’ll be calling is 999.
Since I expect the emergency services won’t love this approach, it’s time to go back to analogue and memorise at least one number of a person who is likely to be useful or at least sympathetic to my needs. It’s actually way harder than I remember. No wonder my kid gave up trying 4 digits into this venture.
CREATIVE NOTES 