Where are you now?

On July 1, 1991, the first telephone call was made using a commercial GSM network. Now, 20 years later, more than 4,4 billion people use a GSM network through 838 systems in 234 countries and territories around the world. And the mobile phone market is still growing. 1 million subscribers are added every day.

The number of conversations that these people have every day can no longer be expressed in numbers, it must be astronomical. You could make a classification of the types of conversations, for example business, private and pleasure. By the latter I mean the majority of all conversations via a mobile phone, which is useless and superfluous, just to have contact with each other for whatever reason.

The question “Where are you now” is the most common question I think asked on mobile, often completely irrelevant if you don't plan to meet the other person any time soon. Another great question is: “What are you doing now?” and the man, who is in bed with a beautiful Thai beauty, obediently tells his wife that he is reading a book or preparing for tomorrow's meeting.

You can already draw the conclusion that I am not in favor of all that mobile phone use. I find it costly, often superfluous and above all very often disturbing. I get very annoyed when I speak to someone and his mobile phone indicates on one of the countless possibilities (ringing, vibrating, music, etc.) that a conversation is coming. And again, it is often a fluke conversation with the aforementioned questions.

In the eighties, by order of my management, I had a car phone, the predecessor of the mobile phone. You got a box the size of a computer in your trunk, an extra antenna on your roof and you could be reached through the road. It was handy, because now I could call my wife, that she could put the potatoes on the gas low, because I was stuck in traffic again. Later you could also use the car phone mobile and that was handy to call my dear Thai lady every day. Commercial? Yes, of course also used, but very limited and restrained. If you prepare well for a customer visit, that telephone is usually superfluous.

Oh, I can give many examples of good business use of a mobile phone, but I am sure that a large number of calls would not have been necessary if one had been better prepared.

In my company, the telephone costs eventually spiraled out of control, because more than half of the staff had a mobile phone and there was no distinction between private and business calls. At meetings I always advocated limiting conversations to absolute necessity and when that didn't help I had at least half of the users hand in the phone. I once had to speak to my Chief Assembly, but he was busy (mobile) and that conversation took a long time, you can say very long. When the call ended, I asked him who he had been talking to on the phone. It turned out to be a mechanic who just started his job Thailand completed, wrote his report and went over it with his Chief over the phone. When I asked when that man would return, the answer was that the engineer was waiting at the airport for departure to the Netherlands and would be back in the office tomorrow. Couldn't that @#$% conversation wait until the next day?

Now, retired and living in Thailand, of course I also have a mobile phone. After all, everyone has one or even sometimes two? I hardly ever use it – I don't even know my own number – and I do take it with me when I go out of town. Especially in Thailand it is useful to have a telephone with you in case of all kinds of problems.

In my circle of acquaintances here I am sometimes called Fred Flintstone, because I don't participate in all that mobile hassle and the many possibilities that the mobile phone has. Old-fashioned, not keeping up with the times, is what they call it. If we now sit together with 4 people, at least 2 are on the phone or surfing the Internet. Handy dude, I'll give you an example: I have a list of all restaurants in Pattaya, you click on one and you get to see the address, telephone and even a map. Gee, that's nice, when are you going to that restaurant? Well, I hardly go to restaurants because I think they are too expensive. No Baht on a restaurant, but an iPad or Xoom or whatever those things may be called for several (tens of) thousands of Baht.

A good friend of mine from Sweden recently told me that he had 1150 E-mail addresses of friends, family and acquaintances stored in his mobile phone. 1150? I have sent and received quite a few E-mails in my working life, but I can hardly imagine that I would ever get so many E-mail addresses. How many do you have regular contact with, I asked. After some thought, the narrow answer came, with 30 to 40 people.

It goes without saying that all Thais have a mobile phone and that certainly also applies to the Thai bargirls. Sit at a bar and half of the ladies will be sitting with that stupid device on their ears or looking at the screen with all interest. If a Farang comes to sit at the bar with his sweet lady, the first thing that lady does is to pick up her cell phone and make a call. Probably to give her friends an interim report and to get rid of that difficult conversation with that Farang. I even heard a story recently that a Farang had to interrupt his short time because the lady in question was called.

I could go on lamenting, but my point is that we don't or hardly talk to each other anymore or just oh-and. We no longer make an appointment to catch up, if we have something to say, we will send an SMS. The latter also seems to have been overtaken by other systems such as Blueberry and such.

I can no longer keep up with these developments – who knows what will follow. I don't want that either, because I think that the use of mobile phones is taking on more and more antisocial forms.

I'm recently in a restaurant and a Farang with a Thai lady enters. They don't talk to each other, hardly pay attention to the menu, order something to eat anyway and then both sit and play with their mobile phones. Well, I thought, they must be texting each other.