Carol’s Column

Small things that shock from a dizzy height

Actually, it’s the small things in life which shock. For instance, I heard about a passenger on a Swissair flight who made a call from her airline phone.

Okay, you say, so what? The point is, this perky passenger spoke for 123 minutes and then paid R4 470 for the pleasure.

I had a heart attack because the only person I know who can talk for that length of time on a phone is my daughter who at the moment is backpacking somewhere around Europe.

When I caught my breath, I realised it couldn’t be her. She’s a penurious ex-student who worked her butt off to earn money to escape into the big wild world.

Of course, the world’s wild. In Spain they let bulls run loose in the streets, in Australia they have dwarf-throwing contests and in Pretoria they have a bondage club with women in cages.

To get back to that call. Who else other than my daughter speaks for over two hours on a phone? Perhaps she’d impulsively caught a plane as young people do and was on her way to Kamchatka or Alaska and decided she’d chat with a friend.

Good heavens, that meant she had R30 for the rest of the year.

A voice in the sky — it’s remarkable how phones have changed over the years. In the old days, in the rural areas like Orange Grove, there were wind-up phones with handles you had to turn to get an operator.

Then came ordinary plug-in phones, the ones still in use in most homes throughout the nation. Those attached to a teenager as a non-optional extra.

And then came the cordless mobile phone. Fairly cumbersome, most South Africans smuggled them back from overseas wrapped in dirty underwear which no customs official would have the audacity to search.

Today, the cordless phone is modern history and it’s the cell phone used by millions of our countrywomen and men. Do you know that on Durban’s North Beach, if a cell phone rings, more people rush out of the water to answer it than if somebody yells “Shark!”

The Japanese have sashayed one step further. In the Land of the Rising Sun and raw fish, they’ve invented a lover’s phone with pressure pads that enables users to hold hands figuratively while phoning each other across the world.

And in true Gallic style, the French have created a phone which takes commands. You insert a credit card in the appropriate place then command the phone. It will dial the number you require and voila. You are immediately engaged.

Nevertheless, these small machines do have the ability to shock. Recently in England, Elaine Simpson dispatched her husband Charles heavenwards by stabbing him with a carving knife when he hid her cell phone because she much preferred it to him.

Personally, I find cell phones impossible to use. The numbers are almost invisible and invariably I cut off the person to whom I’m speaking by inadvertently pushing the “off” button with my large nose.

To get back to that original Swissair call. Could it have been my daughter? For a week I suffered anxiety attacks until she phoned from a feminist pond at Hampstead Heath in London where she was sunbathing. She said it was so hot even the swans were sweating.

A feminist pond? There was worse to come.

“Ma, you’re not going to believe this,” she said. “I’ve borrowed the cutest cell phone, it’s the latest invention from Japan and it fits into the palm of my hand.”

“How big is it?” I asked.

“The size of a nipple,” she replied.

As I said, it’s the small things in life which shock.

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