Get off the phone!

Confession time: I hate the phone.

I hate the 32 bars of music that play while I'm waiting to be put through to 'one of our team'. I hate being told 'your call is important to us' - it's obviously not important enough for the company to hire more call centre staff so I don't have to hang on for 10 minutes. I hate the endless loop of 'to blah blah blah, press 3'. I'm convinced following all the available options will only lead me back to the start of the list, since none of them meet my needs.

Last week, my library buddy and I went to a homebound client's house and got no answer. Very worrying. We looked for the warden of the sheltered housing complex the client lives in, but she is responsible for 5 sites and was obviously elsewhere. In the end, we made a note of the only phone number on view, went back to the library, pretty worried, and phoned them. This is a huge organisation - GHA - but it has only one phone number. We took it in turns to hold on. After about 15 minutes we got through to a person, who didn't know what to do. My library buddy told her: phone the warden, find out if she knows where the client is and phone us back. Luckily, the client was in hospital - I say luckily but she could just as easily have been dead behind the door.

People will say anything on the phone, things they wouldn't dare say to your face. I've been shouted at and sworn at more often than I care to remember. I've also been told off for being rude by a woman trying to sell me electricity when I told her I never bought things over the phone. For months now, I've had to tolerate up to 7 phone calls a day from people trying to get me to claim for PPI, despite the fact I've never bought such insurance. And yes, I am registered with the website that should protect me from these calls - except when they come from overseas - as they so often do these days.

I watch the generation below mine - and sometimes people of my age - unable to manage a lunch with friends without checking their mobiles every few minutes. I hear about phone-bullying far too often: teenagers getting horrible texts which drive them to mutilate themselves and occasionally to kill themselves.

And now a nurse has apparently committed suicide after being inadvertantly caught up in the 'Kate is pregnant' story. Most people sympathise with the victim of this phone 'prank'. But I've also been told on Facebook that Kate Middleton is responsible for the woman's death and that the nurse was obviously not fit to do the job she was doing if that's all it took to send her over the edge.

I just want to mention a single word: ethics. The ethics of the two media journalists who made the phone call interest me. The UK is in the middle of a debate about the regulation of the press. I am in favour of control of the press, in the form that has been adopted in the Scandinavian countries. Maybe
Jacintha Saldanha had never given it much thought. Her husband and kids may see it differently.