‘Wrong button, Pete,’ Jeff says calmly. ‘You have to press the green button, remember?’
‘Eh?’
‘PRESS GREEN!’ Mum pops a vein.
Once again, this oh-so-hilarious charade gets underway. Deafening phone, dithering father, desperate countdown, deliberating finger, determined press.
‘Hi Pete, it’s me,’ Jeff says into his own phone. The proximity of the two devices causes echoes to ricochet about the car. I make a mental note to call the CIA later and inform them of this new method of torture.
‘Hello? Nup. I can’t hear you, Jiffy,’ he yells through the microphone and presses the red button to hang up.
Jeff takes Dad’s phone back and expertly sets the volume of the output speaker to max. He has done this before. In truth, Dad asks one of us to adjust the volume of his phone every couple of days. He has been taught to only ever press two buttons on it: green to answer calls and red to end calls. Yet, I know that in only a few days, both volume buttons will have been lowered to their minimum again.
Jeff hands the phone back to Dad and we go through a repeat of the deafening experiment. Another bomb. Another countdown. Three . . . Two . . .
‘Hello?’ Dad answers.
‘Pete? Can you hear me now?’ Jeff yells into his microphone. The resulting roar of feedback shatters the windows of a house fifty metres off the road.
‘Ah, yes. That’s better. Thanks, Jiffy!’
It is an understatement to say Mum looks flustered. I catch her reflection in the rear vision mirror and it’s all she can do to stop herself from imploding. But she can’t exactly claim the high ground here. At home when we were growing up, whenever Jude was on a ‘trunk’ call, she made sure she projected her voice to accommodate the distance between St Clair and Wagga Wagga where her brother lives. I suspect my Uncle Paul calls her with cotton wool shoved deep into his ear canals. This continues to this day and as I’m just a few streets away I merely get yelled at, but if Glen calls from Canada her decibels increase astronomically because it’s just so far for her voice to travel.
Stupidly, when my parents moved we decided not to get them a landline as we hoped mobile phones would alleviate the need for yelling. Dad hasn’t actually had his mobile phone for long. We bought one for him because I was worried about him not being able to call one of us, should he need to, on the rare occasions he and Mum weren’t together.
It had taken about six months to teach Mum how to text and take calls on an old iPhone I gave her, so I decided on the simplest model Samsung to accommodate Dad’s complete lack of technical experience. The problem is, since I have used iPhones for the last decade, I’m no longer as accustomed to the quirks of other brands. But what appeared to be complicated to me ended up being like asking my father to translate the Oxford English into Latin. Gone were the days of Dad being so far ahead of us in the technical stakes that he had an actual phone in his car! You remember the ones? As big as a brick, with a thick aerial stuck through the glass on the back window and a briefcase-sized machine in the boot. Ahead of his time, my father certainly had been.
Getting him to understand how to open the phone, that a blank screen didn’t mean it had died, and which buttons to press to not only dial a number but to also answer a ringing call meant long, repetitious hours of instruction. He’s received the same amount of training in the complex science of sending and receiving text messages, but all too readily gave up on that caper. I have lost sleep fretting over his inability to send an emergency SMS should he ever need to or read one sent by the SES.
Particularly mysterious is his ability to switch on airplane mode. For weeks on end he will not realise that he’s done it, then finally wonder why he’s no longer receiving calls. I’ll then get a desperate phone call from him on Mum’s phone while I’m on the mower or tractor, or at some other inopportune moment, and will have to pull over, turn off the machinery and attempt to talk Dad through the agonising process of finding the Settings menu on his phone. Not hearing me clearly on the other end of the line is one thing, but if he can’t find his reading glasses we have no chance in hell.
Admittedly, it’s not exactly straightforward and I always forget how it’s done, so I don’t blame him for not working that one out. But how on earth he manages to switch on airplane mode (quite complex in itself!) while simply answering phone calls is anyone’s guess. Every few months, I’ll get the same call: ‘Skeet, sorry to trouble you mate, but airplane mode switched itself back on again.’ Accomplished by person, or persons, unknown.
Recently, Grant was asked to investigate why Dad had seemingly received no new calls. There was no need for the phone’s manual this time – a quick scan of outgoing calls showed that Dad was still on a call to a friend . . . and had been for four days because they’d both neglected to hang up.
Just then, Dad’s phone rings.
‘Is that you, Jiffy?’ he asks.
‘No, Pete.’
I watch Dad out the corner of my eye. ‘Pauline’, he announces. He actually can read the screen.
There are two large buttons in front of him . . . one red, one green. He presses red.
‘Hello? HELLO? Nope, bad connection,’ he says and puts down the phone.
‘Did you press the green button, Dad?’ I ask.
‘Mate?’ He intones threateningly. ‘Yes, I did!’
Suddenly Jude’s phone rings.
‘Is that you, Jiffy?’ She turns and asks to save herself the hassle of looking in her bag.
‘No, Jude.’
Mum struggles to retrieve her bag from the floor and the phone from her bag. Finally she brings it to her ear. I wince, already knowing what’s coming, but at least she can identify the bright green answer button with ease. She pulls a deep breath into her lungs.
‘HELLO?’ she absolutely screams into the receiver.
My eardrums wobble with the sonic boom. ‘OH, HI MATE. HOW ARE YOU?’
I find it hard to believe she can actually be this loud.
‘WE’RE IN THE CAR. WITH TODDY. HE SAID IT WAS A BAD CONNECTION. I’LL PASS YOU OVER TO PETER.’
Mum hands the phone to Dad. ‘IT’S PAULINE,’ she yells, though I can’t be sure if it’s because she’s forgotten she’s not talking into the phone or if she is accounting for Dad’s deafness.
‘Hello mate,’ Dad says into the phone at a perfectly reasonable volume. Some weird fault has occurred.
‘What? Are you there? Have I got you?’ he says over the top of Pauline’s reply, audible to everyone else in the car. ‘I’ve lost you, mate . . .’
He pulls the phone away and looks at it blankly.
‘Nope, we’ve lost her,’ he says, and passes the phone back to Mum.
‘YOU THERE, PAULINE? YES! HE COULDN’T HEAR YOU! OKAY MATE! I’LL LET HIM KNOW YOU’RE NOT COMING TO HOUSIE. BYE, MATE.’
