PETER HITCHENS: Why doesn’t anyone use telephones to make calls any more?

What happened to the phone? It is perhaps the most brilliant invention of modern times and is being put out of business by inferior rivals. And this happened just as it had reached its technical peak.

Almost everyone nowadays has a phone in their pocket or bag. It has a free, easy-to-use voicemail if you miss the call or are busy when it comes in. Yet these things are used less and less for the simple purpose of one person talking to another person who is far away.

On my mobile device, which must be one of the most outdated and crude in everyday use, you have to hunt for the phone function among about fifteen other purposes, from taking photos to arguing on Twitter. And I think most people who want to contact me do so via emails, texts, or that green thing whose name I can never remember but which is definitely not Instagram.

I like to think I’m not a casual person, but over the last few years I’ve missed an annoying number of fairly urgent appointments because the person who invited me chose to text or email me instead of just calling me . The great thing about calling people is that you know you have reached them. I accusingly tell these texters and emailers that they might as well have sent me a postcard, and they giggle – but I guess they don’t know what a postcard is.

The problem works, or rather doesn’t work, the other way. I spend a lot of time trying to get government departments, police forces, local authorities or agencies like the BBC to answer my annoying questions.

Once upon a time there was a publication called The White Book, which was regularly revised and contained the direct telephone numbers of government press officers. The title page stated that it was ‘intended to assist journalists and staff of the organizations mentioned’.

I still have what I think is one of the last ones ever released (if it’s still being released I have no idea where to get it). It is still somewhat useful for the rare state offices that have not been renamed or repurposed five times since its publication in 2012.

Now they’re all websites or generic numbers, if you’re lucky. I’ve noticed that government agencies are increasingly answering phone messages with emails, and the great thing about emails is that if you don’t want to answer the questions, you can just stop answering them.

It’s the same at many companies. If you can find their phone number on their website, which you often can’t, you can’t get anyone to answer it. The idea, of course, is to get the information a customer needs on the Internet, presumably to save staff. But I often have a specific question that the website does not help with.

It’s also a general rule that the younger a person is, the harder it is to get him or her to actually answer the phone. Of course, sometimes this is because modern phones tell you who you’re trying to reach, and I can understand if people of any age don’t want to hear from me. But I get the same complaint from people who are much nicer than me.

In the midst of all this, I’m reminded of how frustrating the world used to be if you didn’t have a phone. I must be one of the last people to ever receive a real telegram – and not one of those greeting messages. The year was 1969 and it came in a small yellow envelope, delivered by a young man on a red and gold Royal Mail motorcycle, and it contained (as telegrams should do) some unwelcome news. This was because I had no telephone in my cheap sitting room, not even a telephone box on the stairs.

My early years as a reporter were haunted by the need to search for such phone booths (something I had nightmares about for years). I learned how to call a number when the dial was broken, as was often the case. I was even told how to disable the phone to prevent my rivals from using it. When I finally got to work at a national newspaper, the post office – which then controlled almost all the telephones in the country – allowed me to stand in line and I finally had my own telephone.

I can still remember the song and the sheer joy of knowing it was mine. My office made good use of it, with late night phone calls complaining that I had been captured by my rivals. There was a strict rule: When I was out of the office, all reporters had to call the news desk every hour, on the hour, in case they wanted to reach us.

Later, when I started traveling in the old communist world, where it could take hours to make international telephone calls, and where telephone booths could as easily give you an electric shock as they could connect you to anyone, I had to start all over again. start. Before I started living and working in Moscow, I took a short course in telephone technology so that I could connect good quality British telephones to the Soviet network, which significantly improved the quality of calls.

I also set up complex systems so that I could pick up messages from London on my answering machine, via telephone booths in Moscow (two kopecks per call – a bargain). The problem was that it took at least three hours to call London back, unless you could make an illegal chargeback call through Helsinki, the only foreign city I could call from my illegally rented apartment from the Soviet elite.

Lewis Collins used a walkie-talkie in the 1970s TV series The Professionals

Thanks to this frantic need to stay in touch somehow, I drove past one of the biggest stories of my life: Boris Yeltsin climbing on a tank during a KGB coup in August 1991. I could tell that there was something about it the hand was. but I had been out of touch with London for so long that I didn’t dare stay and look. A big mistake.

A mobile phone would have changed everything, but at that time such things were on the edge of science fiction, especially in the unmodernized Soviet empire.

In the 1970s we had all marveled at a TV action series called The Professionals, in which secret agents Bodie and Doyle, played by Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw, kept in constant contact with headquarters via portable communicators. Our closest approach to such things was a telephone in a pub, which you had to stuff with coins every few seconds. But at least the USSR still had a functioning system of communications in the style of the 1930s. When a Soviet citizen living in the Urals, 1,100 miles away, had an interesting letter published in The Times, I was asked by London to interview him. But it turned out he didn’t have a phone.

So I went to my beautiful, old-fashioned post office, where there was a cat, balls of string and jars of glue – and sent him a telegram. Within half an hour he had me on the phone. Nowadays I could send him a text or an email. But would he ever answer?