Part 1 – The Dark Ages

I was still in university when I used a mobile phone for the first time . A friend of a friend gave me a lift somewhere, and the first thing I noticed from the front passenger seat of the driver’s arrest-me red 1988 Honda Prelude was the rather ostentatious car phone sitting between us. As we screeched away from the curb the driver, player that he was with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and the collar turned up on his pink Lacoste golf shirt, instructed me to call directory assistance to get an address. This set my mind racing, almost as fast as the sports car I was in:

Directory assistance, from a car phone? Doesn’t he know how much that costs? This guy must be rich… yes, that’s it — he’s a rich gangster in a Chinese Triad and I’m going to die before this ride is over…

Of course I didn’t, but it would be many years before I had a mobile phone to call my own. And even then I still wasn’t sold on the idea.