Jonny McCambridge: Fighting back against technology – the forgotten skill of learning a new phone number

He shoots me a confused look.

To explain, we’ll need to go back in time. For years, I’ve had two phones. These can loosely be described as a work and a personal mobile.

I’ve always had the same personal mobile number. There have been multiple phone upgrades, but it has remained constant. I can recite the 11 digits without needing to think. I do not know the number of my second mobile. I’ve never needed to memorise it as I’ve always given out my personal number.

A few weeks ago, everything changed when I sat on my phone. To compound the offence, I knew that I was doing it and took no preventative action. I was in a friend’s car and, unusually, had my mobile in a rear pocket when I sat down. It seemed like an awful lot of trouble to get up. I mentally carried out a quick risk assessment which attempted to balance up the robustness of the device with the undoubted girth of my rear end. I judged the phone would be fine (I readily concede, this was not my finest moment).

A few miles down the road I heard an unpleasant crunching noise. I retrieved the phone and discovered that scores of tiny cracks had spread across the screen. It also seemed to be a touch slimmer.

Since then the mobile has developed personality issues. Occasionally the touch screen function freezes or locks me out. When this happens, the only option offered is to make an emergency call. While I’ve been sorely tempted, I fear an unwelcome reception if I call 999 to complain that my phone has gone berserk. Sometimes it opens random apps or spontaneously starts playing a song that I’ve never heard before (it has terrible taste in music).

The worst impact, however, has been on the calls function. When I try to have a conversation, it sounds like I’m talking to Darth Vader with a heavy head cold trying to call me from darkest Peru (my fat backside has a lot to answer for!) I know that I will need to get the phone replaced. At some point in the ensuing decades I will do just that.

For now, however, I am having to push as much business as possible through my work phone. This means that I have had to attempt to memorise a second number. I started by writing the digits on the back of my hand as an aide memoire. It didn’t work and instead I received a suspicious enquiry from my wife as to whose number was scribbled there. It was, in many ways, worse to have to admit that it was my own rather than someone else’s.

Several times I have been asked for the new number, but I just can’t get it to stick. I’m fine as far as 07….before it all tends to get a bit hazy. This has led to awkward encounters such as the one from the shop.

I am disturbed by this as I used to be able to remember phone numbers easily. I still know those that I used regularly in my youth. I can recall the landline number of the first house my family lived in (62866), the number when we changed address and the numbers of all of my childhood friends.

Age is undoubtedly a factor in my recall problems. The elastic which aids the flexibility of my thinking is not as pliant as it once was. But it also occurs to me that there is another reason. I have become used to letting the phone do all the work.

I do not know my wife’s mobile number, nor that of my son, my Da or any family member or friend. The only contemporary number that I know is that of the phone squashed by my fat backside. There is no requirement to learn phone numbers any longer as they are all stored digitally. Perhaps the simple set of cognitive skills which enabled me once to recall numbers in a sequence has grown rusty due to neglect.

But I am determined to fight back. I will oil that forgotten part of my brain and persist with the mental gymnastics until I finally memorise the new number. Technology makes life easier, but I don’t like it usurping me entirely in mental tasks. Is it merely a small step from letting the mobile store my numbers to making decisions for me?

Take this example. A few months ago, I was scanning Facebook on the phone. A random post about the glory days of 1980s wrestling appeared on the screen. Being a sucker for nostalgia, I clicked on it.

After that, my profile was absolutely crammed with an unrelenting series of pictures and posts about Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. The social media network was anticipating the content which I might like and served me up a tsunami of it. But there was no place for subtlety or nuance, it had simply decided that because I once read a post about vintage wrestling, then I must want to spend the remainder of my years doing exactly the same thing over and over.

I became more conscious of this trend. If I showed interest in any content on social media, I got deluged by an avalanche of similar material. I quickly came to resent it and developed the habit of scanning Facebook at speed, not dwelling on anything lest I get drowned by hundreds of similar posts. This was clearly nonsensical. In the end I just stopped looking. There was a halcyon era when I was allowed to have interests beyond oversized 1980s wrestlers, when I could remember a new phone number. I’m going back there some fine day.