Beyond my Ken

The popularity of e-mail, text, and other asynchronous keypad-based messaging systems may mean that these days we engage in fewer phone conversations with people we don’t really know. I’m excluding, of course, the unwanted nuisance calls such as:

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          (1)  The tiresome old tosser who declares “this is a free message”. I suspect this is PPI-related, but he’s never got beyond this vacuous announcement, so I don’t know;

·       (2)  The caller, who after a delay of several seconds and a few electronic clunks, states: “I am Adam [sometimes it’s Adrian or John or another very English name]. Oh dear. You are having an accident the terribleness of which is mightily flabbergasting. I am having to ask you some questions. What is your name?”;

·       (3)  The chirpy young guy who always rings in the middle of tea, has an impenetrable Celtic accent and an unspellable name to match, but as far as I can tell is (a) on chummy terms with me and has known me for most of my life, (b) is concerned that I’m having a good day, (c) is not ever so concerned that I’m in the middle of tea, and (d) is very interested in offering me a uniquely special and evanescent deal on a complicated tariff for one of the less interesting utilities - all right, gas.

I’ve no idea what any of these people look like, yet instantly I hear them, with their time-wasting crass intrusions upon my privacy, a fully formed image fills my mind’s eye. It is, respectively:

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      (1) Someone who looks like Gene Hackman in “The French Connection”, wearing a moth-eaten blue overcoat, and for whom – given his apparent age and respectability - I feel pity. That anyone has to make a living in this dismal way, even though he’s only a recording;

·        (2) A crusty, lavishly white –whiskered old fakir (or words to that effect), but again someone for whom I feel a degree of sympathy. No sensible person would do this if they didn’t have to. I can almost hear the monsoon beating down on a corrugated iron roof;

·         (3) An extremely irritating one-hit Irish “rock star” with an aggressively  sanctimonious ego of galactic proportions. No, not that one, the other one. No sympathy.

I’d be quite happy never to hear from any of these unfortunates again, and since signing up a year or two ago to the Telephone Preference Service – touch wood – I haven’t.  But they do allow me to introduce a topic, namely, the sort of mental picture one forms of people one has spoken to several times on the phone, but never met in the flesh, nor seen a photograph of.

Back in the bad old four letter days of work I frequently – say, once a fortnight or so – had to phone a colleague called Ken, who was based a couple of miles away. Ken was always friendly and helpful and a pleasure to talk to, but I didn’t meet him face to face until several years had passed. From the outset I had formed a strong mental image of him, that he was aged about forty, not all that tall, had a moustache, and looked a lot like George Orwell, as per the classic photos. The image was unchanging and enduring. Then one day I had to meet him in real life, for an hour or so, in his office. A delightful man, as I expected, but looking nothing like how I imagined. Instead, he strongly resembled another Ken, a more famous one, comedian Kenneth Horne, he of “Beyond our Ken” and “Round the Horne”, those innocently smutty radio highlights of my childhood Sundays. Completely bald, very tall, not a hint of a moustache. A few greying wisps round the temples. In his early fifties. Not in the least Orwellian. I was astonished that my mental picture of him was so utterly wrong.

Over many years I continued to have pleasant phone conversations with Ken, and I continued to visualise him as before, as George Orwell, never as he actually was. The mind is a wonderfully inventive facility and in this instance was determined to overrule the evidence of my eyes. So much for the phone. I wonder if an ability to deduce erroneous and indelible facial features from the terse acronyms and emoticons of e-communications will ever become a topic for discussion, or whether another tiny opportunity for exercising the delusions of the imagination has been squeezed out of our lives by “progress”.