Long-distance calling

Last Sunday morning, I had a conference call with my sister (in London) and my parents (in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) using Skype. My sister and I were using Skype on our computers on the voice call, occassionally exchanging short chat messages when the sound quality warped. My parents were on speakerphone in KL and I had conferenced them in using SkypeOut (they don’t have a computer). The sound quality was patchy at times and the whole conversation took a longer because we had to repeat ourselves from time to time.

But it was brilliant to be able to have all of us on the call at the same time. And it cost be about 30-40p altogether for the SkypeOut part of the call.

It made me think about how difficult it used to be to speak to my family from England when I first came over. Mobile phones had not been invented yet and all we had at school was a call box in the cold, dark cubby hole under the stairs. The school discouraged us from calling home more than once a week - in case the contact with home made us more homesick and unhappy with our lot at school. So once a week, the girls would queue up on the stairs to call home.

I don’t think I called home once a week because of the cost of the call. It was a coin-operated phone which we had to feed with a ton of coins. The only way to do it was to call reverse-charge and back in those days, reverse charge calls were even more expensive. I’d queue up and call my uncle in London instead. It was nice to chat to him as a family contact but it wasn’t the same as speaking to my mummy. (I was 12.)

Later on, after I went to university, I think overseas calls got a bit cheaper and I’d call once a month or something like that - reverse charge - from my digs in Oxford. We had one payphone that we all shared. I don’t remember using the phone much with my friends - we used the “pigeon post” system where we could send written notes on bits of paper to students in other colleges via the University’s internal mail system, or we would just turn up at someone’s room or at their digs and hope they’d be in. (The mobile phone still hadn’t been invented then).

When I started work and had my own place, I remember being careful about making non-essential calls after lunch or in the evenings as calls in the morning were more expensive. I was the first among my friends, being a techhy type even then, to get an answering machine. It was at least a year or more before some of my friends could even get over the strangeness of it and leave a message. And when I got a fax machine, I’d say, “Fax me the directions of how to get to your place” and they’d just laugh at me. (And yes, we were still waiting for the mobile phone to be invented).

I went off on a cycling holiday in Spain in the late 1980s with a three other friends - back in those days without mobile phones - and at one stage, we had to split into two pairs because of illness and bicycle problems. One friend and I would cycle the rest of the way and the other two would take the train. We pulled out our maps and poring over the route, we agreed that we’d meet again at our end destination, Santiago de Compostela. I made a list of the three hotels in our guidebook and we would aim to meet at the one at the top of the list first. If the other pair was not there, we’d work our way down to the other two. And if we came to the end of the list and we couldn’t find each other? That option never crossed our minds. I can’t imagine doing that trip now without at least texting or Twittering each other every hour!

These days, we text and Twitter and Skype and chat online and call without a second thought. I’ve got my mum signed up to receive my tweets on her mobile phone and she’s getting the hang of texting. On some call plans, it’s actually now cheaper to call her in Malaysia than to call a UK landline. I’m now looking into signing us all up on Jajah.com to get free landline conference calling this coming Sunday - hey, why spend 30-40p if we can do it for nothing…

Photo: thanks to porticus.org