Being incommunicado is fine, but losing the mobile causes panic

I made a short but sad trip to Ireland last week. A man I’d known all my life, the father of my childhood friends, had died in his native county Kerry, right out on the far south-west tip of the island.

His funeral was last Thursday and I felt obliged to go, as much out of sympathy for my grieving friends as for the man himself, whom I hadn’t seen for 20 years. Anyway, it had to be done.

Thanks to two modern miracles – Emirates Airline and online car hire – it was all relatively easy. A restful seven hours on the Dubai to Dublin flight set me up for a four-hour drive across Ireland. It wasn’t especially far – just over 300 kilometres – but the Irish road network got progressively more primitive the farther away I travelled from the capital.

By the time I was in Kerry the roads were sometimes no better than single-lane tracks where you had to pull in to let somebody pass and avoid the potholes. Sheikh Zayed Road it was not.

Telecommunications were patchy. The mobile signal was on and off, with a high proportion of calls just cutting off in mid-sentence. Wi-Fi was, on the whole, non-existent except in the bar of Bunker’s Hotel in the little town of Killorglin (population 2,000 or so).

Consequently, for three whole days – two spent flying/driving, one spent mourning – I had no access to the internet at all. No work email, nothing from my two private email accounts. I must admit, after a guilty few hours I felt entirely liberated.

It was nice to soak up the lack of communicability for a while, but as I drove back across the country (with the road network conversely improving now) I realised the hour of reckoning couldn’t be put off forever. There would of course be Wi-Fi in the departure lounge at Dublin airport, and I’d have to come to terms with a monstrous backlog.

I took the two personal emails first. Yes, there were lot of them, but 30 minutes or so later I’d whittled them down to a manageable slug for later action. Then the one I was dreading – work email.

My work email has to be culled at least every couple of hours or it just gets out of hand, with hundreds of message waiting for attention. As I opened the account, however, I realised there was nothing there later than a couple of hours after I got on the plane, three nights back.

The email system had filled up in that short space of time, and simply stopped receiving. Marvellous. There was nothing to delete/answer/action.

So I got into the return flight in better mood. Until I realised I hadn’t seen my mobile phone for a while. I last had it while eating, it was right beside me in the chair, oh no … it must have slipped down the side of the airplane seat. It was now lying in the depths of the moving chair, unreachable. Engineers would have to be called to dismantle the seat. Or maybe the phone had already been crushed to bits when I swung the seat forward for the meal.

In stark contrast to my joy at having no email, I was panic-stricken at the thought of enforced mobile deprivation. Nomophobia, it’s called. The fear of being out of mobile phone contact.

I needn’t have worried. The Emirates cabin staff must have seen it all before, and one plunged his arm into the innards of the seat and retrieved my phone, in perfect condition. Utter relief.

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