In a meeting with a client this week, I was making a point about how the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation lives in a different world to us mere mortals down here in taxpayer land, and I mimed making a phone call by the imagined Commissioner of Taxation Lord Cholmondeley-Smythe.
"What are you doing?"
"Pretending to make a phone call?"
"What?"
"How would you pretend to make a phone call?"
"Like this."
Immediately in my mind I thought that of course that's the way that you would mime pretending to make a phone call. This was yet another reminder that I have less days in front of me than behind and that Grimaldo Reaper, the slow-walking destroying angel of death who moves at less than 0.45m/s, will eventually arrive for my appointment and will collect. Hades and the Grave are always open and always hungry - feeding time is all the time.
Now I already knew that I was a skeuomorph living in a world which has revolved and spun around and changed again and again and again, but this was yet another reminder that the world which inhabits my imagination has already been and gone.
To explain this further:
I mimed holding a ball and stick telephone; with what would be the mouthpiece (the ball on the stick) in front, and with the earpiece sideways to my ear. On top of this, I had also mimed dialling the telephone with a rotary dialler. The weird thing is that the only place that I have ever actually used a ball and stick telephone was oh so long ago when I was working at the 'Money Box Branch' of the Commonwealth Bank at 48 Martin Place. Even then it was an archaic piece of equipment which as it was an analogue device, had to be patched in with an adapter to the Cat-5 connectors. Do not ask me how that would have been connected through the PABX.
Our client who is a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed lad of 19 and who is about to work for his dad's plumbing business, mimed something entirely different. He mimed by putting a palm to his ear, as though he was holding a mobile phone. Here's the weird thing in my mind - as a 19 year old lad who is bigger and obviously stronger than I am, that means that he was born in 2005. This is important because the iPhone was introduced in 2007; which means that he is incapable of remembering a kosmos where flat screen mobile phones and the internet on every device means that the world is in your hands, is not only ubiquitous but normal and boring.
Even then, there is a whole step which has been skipped here. The whole set of telephones where the handset contains both the mouthpiece and the loudspeaker, only hangs on as the icon on people's telephones exists as a skeuomorph. The usual method of miming that, probably for the best part of 70 years, would have been to make a fist except with one's thumb and pinky extended.
I have a suspicion that if you were to give a child, maybe even as old as 17 (and therefore born after iPhone) who never grew up with a fixed handset, that they would be utterly mystified as to how to make a telephone call; especially if it had a rotary dialler. This isn't to say that the kids today are somehow silly or dumb but rather that they like everyone else would need to learn how to use a piece of equipment that they'd never ever encountered before. In this respect this is identical to old people not knowing how to programme the VCR, young people not knowing how to use a mangle, or anyone born into a metric world knowing what a furlong or a firkin is.
The thing is that we're reasonably fine with the existence of skeuomorphs in the world. There is a railway level crossing sign out at Vineyard which shows a Steam Locomotive, despite the fact that the last time that a steam train probably rolled down that track was in the 1950s. Every single bottle of Maple Syrup in the world has wee ickle fake handles on them, in spite of the fact that there is no sensible way to use them and at any rate they were supposed to be there to string a rope through. Hiding in plain sight is the capital letter A which is ultimately derived from the Phoenician letter, which comes from the word 'auk' and is the representation of a cow; which you can only get an idea of if you turn the letter A upside-down.
In some respects, the fact that I mimed a holding a ball and stick telephone which is a skeuomorph as a result of working in a bank, is itself something of a skeuomorph. One of my jobs at the Commonwealth Bank was in cheque acceptance; which involved running hundreds of cheques through a sorting machine so that they could all be returned to the issuing bank. We were assured that by 2010, cheques were to be phased out. Here we are in 2024 and cheques have almost died a natural death. What's even weirder is that bank branches themselves have mostly died a natural death. For that matter, even the concept of cash is kind of dying a natural death. I have still not seen a King Charles III coin; even a year after him being King.
Maybe it's just a natural consequence of getting older that the world has revolved and spun around and changed again and again and again, into things which do not resemble the world which inhabits my imagination. More likely though it is likely that the world which inhabits my imagination is one which I never inhabited. Why can't I have a ball and stick telephone in burnished copper? Why must we live in a world where everything is minimalist, and cold and impersonal; where people only feel the world through a telephone touch?
On the other hand, pretending to be Lord Cholmondeley-Smythe making a telephone call on a ball and stick telephone despite being clearly an archaic skeuomorph, is so incredibly apt at describing systems which are utterly arcane and opaque.
"Rah, rah, rah... job-job-job... where's my tax refund and why can't I claim a deduction for clearing away all the vagrants and pheasants?"
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