Mobile phones are almost everywhere but one place they most definitely are not is on Singapore Airlines' long-haul flights such SQ282 that recently jetted me towards my Easter break in Malaysia. The serenity on the aircraft was palpable. No ironic ringtones. No being forced to overhear one side of a conversation. No annoying clicking as some attention-seeker typed a message. I received no emails, no texts and I didn't have to obsessively trawl news websites on my iPhone to stay abreast of current affairs. It was blissful.
After dinner I settled in to watch the recently released Polanski film Carnage, a theatre-style talk-fest involving four actors set inside an apartment in real time. If the vase of tulips is the notional fifth character then the corporate lawyer's mobile telephone is surely the sixth. This character spends much of the 80-minutes talking on his phone as he handles an emerging PR crisis. "What's happening somewhere else always seems more important," says his wife (played by Kate Winslet) before she drops his phone into the vase of flowers.
I think this film made me hyperaware of people with mobile phone attachment issues. One of the guests at our resort in Malaysia was a man from the UK who was permanently talking on the phone while his patient wife, displaying the "unconditional surrender" Winslet's character spoke of in the film, watched their children in the pool. My girlfriend and I were horrified. "He thinks he's on holiday with his family but he may as well not even be here," we said. We decided it was a technological form of presentee-ism; he was physically present but mentally elsewhere.
Yet my own phone came in handy when a tsunami alert was issued for Indian Ocean countries following an earthquake near Indonesia. A succinct text message from my husband in New Zealand - "Tsunami warning in Malaysia!!!!" - at 5.43pm local time was followed just seconds later by a telephone call from a Singapore-based friend.
I immediately visited the resort's reception desk where I discovered that the beach and lower pool had been closed as a precaution, and that the main building where we slept and dined was so high in Langkawi's rainforest that we were safe from any potential tsunami.
In order to avoid $10 per MB charges I'd turned off my iPhone's roaming function upon arrival in Malaysia but I switched it on again so I could keep up-to-date with the tsunami alert. I checked the NZ Herald website frequently and shortly received a text from Vodafone New Zealand: "Hi, you have incurred roaming charges which we would like to discuss with you ..." I'm not looking forward to my next bill.
