Can’t live by Slate House Signs alone!

SLATE HOUSE SIGNS in this blog. Instead of slate house signs I decided to go on a bit of a rave – I have a feeling that I will; do this more often of late!

Some of you out there will remember a time long, long ago…before e-commerce, before e-marketing and e-business. Even before mobile phones and the Internet. And, no, it actually wasn’t that long ago. I mean we are not talking Victorian times or even world war two. No – we’re talking the eighties.

I worked night shift for a company that was at the cutting edge of mobile technology at the time – the Pager service industry. Come on, put your hands up if you remember those. A small black box about the size of a cigarette box that people used to send you one way voice messages through and then you would phone the person that the message concerned. Well – you would if you could understand a word that was being said to you. Your average message went something like; Beep (as the pager warned you that a message was about to be relayed) and then would follow… ‘frxaa brrt munumnumm’ and then they would repeat it…‘frxaa brrt munumnumm’. Then you would phone the messaging company from a call box to find out what the message was in the first place so why didn’t they simply Beep you to phone them and then they could tell you the message. Why the farce with the …‘frxaa brrt munumnumm’. Anyway – by the time that you had found a piece of paper, and then a pen, and then another pen that actually worked and finally written the number down you had run out of change for the phone so you couldn’t phone the person at any rate. As I say – this was the very pinnacle of mobile communication at the time.

And if you wanted to actually write something to someone (you know – write, like a text or an e-mail). Well – you’d get a piece of paper and a pen, write your missive, seal it in an envelope and post it off. If you were lucky you would get a reply in a few days. So you can see why expressions like LOL and BFF were pointless – if your communication time was going to take so long then you wanted it to take at least a few minutes to read or else you felt cheated.

And you know what else…I don’t miss those days at all. I love being able to communicate on the go. I love Internet shopping and e-commerce and mass marketing e-mails. Communication rocks.

Ha – so no slate house signs but one can’t live on slate house signs alone.