I tried to get disconnected from the Esat mobile phone service recently. This should be easy enough. After all, if you want to be connected to these mobile phone companies, it is the simplest thing. You can see so many cretins in their four-wheel drives, their sunglasses on top of their heads as they palm the steering wheel around the corner, their mobile phones to their ears while idiot -music thumps from their sound-systems. If such imbeciles can be connected to Esat, then surely a sage old cove like me could be disconnected as easily as they were connected.
I rang Esat Digital and spoke to a customer care executive - that's what Esat calls its operators. Telecom has another name for its operators - customer care nuclear thermobiologists, probably: Immaculata speaking, how may I help you pleeease? Well, Immaculata, my dear, you can help me by sparing me the bogus personal touch simply by saying, Good morning, operator here, what can I do for you? Or is that approach too sensible? Presumably: so instead we have telephone companies giving their employees ridiculous job titles and causing them to intone service-mantras coined in the Conrad Hilton School of Hotel Management. This is not service; it is glue.
Security details
So, anyway, I told the CCE who answered the phone that I wanted to be disconnected. She asked me why. I told her why. Are you sure, she asked. Sure I'm sure; as I was equally sure that I wasn't asked these damn-fool questions when I originally arranged an Esat connection. My CCE then asked for my security details - date of birth, number of toes, grandmother's sexual preferences, that kind of thing. She then asked me to hold while she got a supervisor, who went over the same questions and security details. (She liked to do what?)
Are you sure you want to be disconnected, the supervisor persevered. Yes, yes yes, more than ever now, with all your talk of CCEs, and your questions, and your security details. Just disconnect me, now, if you please. I'm sorry, replied the supervisor, her voice odious with triumph, I can only disconnect you one month after your next billing date, provided that you have applied for disconnection in writing.
This conversation took place early last month, just after the billing date of March 4th. I could therefore not be disconnected for another month after April 4th, obliging me to keep a service I did not want for almost two extra months. Moreover, since disconnection could occur only after a written request, what was the purpose of the security hoops I had been made to dance through? Meanwhile, I am paying for a service that I don't want.
Internet trading
The picture is not entirely black, however. In the US, some 30 dot-com companies are pleading with the public to do business on the Net because so many Internet businesses are in trouble. This is excellent news at which we should rejoice heartily: if the US, with its strong traditions of mail-order shopping, is emphatically moving away from Internet trading, how long before the system fails completely?
This is not to welcome a reversion to the electronic stone age. The computer allows me to write this column in my study overlooking the Wicklow mountains. Communications will still exist on-line, and maybe people will still sell e-mails to each other; and though I personally deplore them, I can see their uses. Lawyers can send millions of words whizzing through the ether, backwards and forwards, and their lives are made all the miserable, which is perfect, for misery tends to be what solicitors want from life. "The Laughing Lawyer" is a slim volume, its author running out of ideas after he wrote the words: "Chapter One".
But it has always been the case that, in times of rapid technological advance, retrenchment must follow. Not every single invention, not every new discovery, seizes the public imagination; not every new custom survives the longer test of time. For example, the family meal was pronounced dead a couple of years ago. Children ate on the hoof, and family culture became dissipated, or television-oriented - irreversibly, it seemed. But not so. The latest research in Britain suggests that parents have tired of the dispersal of their children around the home, and are reintroducing the family meal as a stabilising dynamic which brings ritual and conversation into a home.
Habits die hard
We are a conservative species, more cautious than we care to admit. Habits die hard, even vanishing completely for generations before emerging again, vibrant, healthy, refulgent. Look at the Orthodox Church, a mere 10 years after the collapse of Soviet communism, once again one of the most powerful institutions in Russia. And maybe the Catholic Church, over which I was pronouncing the long-term obsequies a couple of weeks ago, will prove me wrong.
A useful start would be for it to pronounce an anathema on telephone companies which call their employees "customer care executives", and from whose clutches you can get free only by joining an escape committee and spending the next two years spilling soil from your trousers or digging tunnels with empty bean cans for other Esat POWs.
Then it's our turn. It's midnight, I've a woollen mask on my face, and Dickie Attenborough and Steve McQueen are beside me, as the Esat searchlights illuminate the barbed wire on edge of the compound. We exchange looks. Good luck chaps, I murmur, my lips quivering pluckily. And then we make a break for it. . .