At last this piece of Albanian-made, badly-glued Bakelite tinkles weakly and I grab it in an urgent, sweaty palm like a man clutching at a lifebelt.
It’s my London office but a voice I don’t recognise, obviously a temp. I shout into the phone and my voice bounces back in an eerie Alpine echo: “Hi, look this is Stuart White in Athens, I urgently need to speak to – “
“Sorry, it’s very hard to hear you. It’s a bad line – you’ll have to call back.” The phone at the other end goes down with a maddening click.
Those were the supposedly bad old days of business travel communication, before international direct dialling, email, laptops slimmer than Kate Moss, and the ubiquitous BlackBerry. Now wherever you are on this apparently shrunken globe, you’re never more than a second away from instant communication.
Not so. The fact remains that keeping in touch with head office is still the numero uno six-Panadol travel headache for every business person. There’s a laughable BBC promo which shows their intrepid correspondents typing out reports on laptops in far-flung African villages and Middle East warring hotspots. When all of us know that you can still hit a communications impasse in the world’s biggest cities and the most modern business hotels.
In New York I checked into a major chain hotel, went out for a meeting, came back, jet-lagged and tired and wrote out a 1,500 word report. I then – pre Wi-Fi – went to plug my laptop modem into the phone socket. It wasn’t there. I looked and looked, wiping my eyes in case I was somehow missing it. I felt like Manuel in Fawlty Towers after Mr. O’Reilly did his erratic building work: “Where is door? Door is gone.” That was me. Where is phone socket? Phone socket gone.
Someone, on hotel instructions, had sealed the phone socket inside the wall, protected by a layer of plaster. I urgently dialled reception: “Ya, well we had people, ya know, stealing the phones and all.”
Could I use their sockets? No; the hotel in its paranoid intensity had sealed every phone socket in the hotel inside the walls. It was now midnight and I was desperate. I tried to get another hotel, but gave up after fourteen attempts. It was convention time.
This report had to be in London when the bosses got in at nine. I took out my wallet. They worship only one God in Manhattan, and His name is Greenback. I called maintenance and lied that my TV wouldn’t work. A corpulent Puerto Rican equipped with tools arrived 45 minutes later. I pointed to the plastered over socket and waved five Andrew Jackson’s in front of him. For $100 would he rip out the plaster so I could utilise the socket?
Thirty minutes later the wall resembled the start of an escape tunnel at Colditz. Humming the theme tune I plugged in and sent my report. Eduardo then tried to patch up the wall. Like a furtive Stalag PoW, after he left I started to strategically place furniture around the still gaping hole in case of a snap guard inspection.
That wasn’t a one-off. I’ve had Wi-Fi connections that wouldn’t… connect that is. I’ve had Business Centres that seem to open every other Tuesday except when there’s an “aaggh” in the month. I once deposited an urgent package for FedEx in a Manila hotel Business Centre. (The hotel had some bizarre rule that FedEx employees could not go to individual rooms – ‘to discourage prostitution.’ I dunno, somehow FedEx and call girls never seemed synonymous.) The next day London said the package hadn’t arrived and what was I playing at? I called FedEx but they knew nothing about it. I went down to the Business Centre. It was Out-to-Lunch. The sole receptionist finally returned picking her teeth of stray rice and sipping a Sprite. She opened her office; I saw the package and – I seem to remember – screamed in anguish. She pulled a rueful face: “I knew there was something I’d forgotten to do yesterday.”
I’ve spent hours in cabs in Third World countries, fuming in traffic jams trying to find Black Hole of Calcutta-like internet cafes because either my hotel Business Centre had internet connection speeds that would shame a particularly lethargic snail with bad blisters, or was missing, presumably off spending more time with its family.
Everything works in theory; it’s when that theory is put into practice that it all too often goes wrong. Never come across Wi-Fi that doesn’t frequently turn into No-Fi? Cell phones that suddenly say, “No signal” just because you crossed the Channel? At least in the past those communication problems came with a certain charm and amusement totally absent today.
At the Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dublin you couldn’t even dial from your phone, you had to go through the operator. When I picked up the phone a charming colleen answered and I asked her – the wording is important here – was it possible she could get me a call to a (specified) London number?
She said that was no problem at all, at all, sorr. I waited, and waited, and waited. After 20 minutes I lifted the receiver again. I enquired after my phone call to London. She was a little baffled: “Well you only asked me if it was it possible to get the number? And I told you it wasn’t a problem. Are you now saying you actually want me to make the call?”
To contact Stuart White email stuartwhite383@btinternet.com
