The Mobile Phone: A weapon of career destruction

Here’s a tip; Nokia provide a simple key lock for your phone to prevent unintentional dialling. Use it. Here’s another; program a dummy number in the first phonebook entry for the time you neglect tip#1. And for the serially stupid here’s Tip#3 which must convey the complex nuances of speaking without thinking but can be summarised thus: Shut The Feck Up!

Experience is how the stupid categorise their biggest mistakes. Tonight I am truly experienced having extemporised to my work colleagues much that I know nothing about and a little I probably shouldn’t have shared. This is just pub talk at the end of a day when a thin corporate veneer prevents you from carrying out instinctively violent actions against the guilty. Which today included almost everybody.

So almost expected behaviour. Except for significant additional circumstances.

My boss, separated by half a mile, but connected through a combination of a forename starting with A” and my wanton abandonment of Tips 1, 2 and 3 gleefully listed to the entire exchange on his office speakerphone.

To be fair, he was trying to explain that I had inadvertently conferenced him in. Somewhat less fairly, my phone was buried deep in a suit pocket which prevented me hearing him. Still Nokia Mics are a bloody triumph of miniature engineering. I really wish they weren’t.

Powerful as the English language is, it cannot even begin to adequately portray the depth of the pit into which my stomach plummeted. Not can it properly document the white hot embarrassment felt on my discovery that PubGate” had gone global.

The only fading glimmer of light in this tunnel of cringe was my genetic inability to tell large fibs allied to a pathological hatred of talking behind people’s backs. Or into their phones as was the case here.

I’m kidding myself. It’s not really a glimmer is it?

The instinctive response is to pass the whole episode off as a indiscretion similar to jarring someone’s arm at the coffee machine. However Andy “ my boss “ is an infrequent reader of this blog and I can hear the bugger chuckling. Quite right too “ experience may finally have taught me that mobile phones, beer and ranting at the speed of stupid make very unhappy bedfellows.

I left the pub somewhat chastised and considered allowing a “Strand Suicide” taxi to administer the last rights, but even this small pleasure was denied me.

Normally at this time of night I’d put my phone on charge. But you know what? I don’t think I’ll bother.

I’m not having a good day.

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