I am from the generation that when you wanted to get in touch with someone in another country, you wrote a letter or if it was extremely urgent you booked an international telephone call. That is apart from Christmas, when you spoke to relatives overseas for about two minutes; it was one of those traditions that I think has now died out.
The Christmas telephone conversation, went something like this when talking to a relative in Australia, “Happy Christmas, It’s mid-day here we are just about to have Christmas dinner and the weather is so cold” “It’s midnight here and so hot” At that point the operator would interrupt this riveting conversation to say time was up and that had cost you half a weeks wages.
The only other time you would make an international call was to inform someone of a death, which lead to the adage, no news is good news. When I worked on Cruise Ships, like the rest of the crew, I would look forward to getting into certain ports, Cape Town, Sydney, Southampton because that is were the letters from home would be.
Well that has all changed with present day technology, emails have put paid to the letter, which is probably one of the reasons there is industrial unrest in the postal service. I cannot remember when I last put pen to paper; I keep in touch with people by email.
Our eldest daughter is in Canada for the foreseeable future to further her education and I have discovered skype, this is a soft ware programme by which you can contact people via your computer.
Once you have set up your skype account, which takes about two minutes or get a child to do it, you can login and so long as the person at the other end is also a skype customer and has a camera on their computer, they login and you can see and talk to them for FREE.
Skype make their money from people using its service to make phone calls via the computer, but you are not required to do that to use the skype service and I would really recommend it if you want to keep in touch and see the person.
It does not just work with people overseas; you can talk to local friends and neighbours as well.
I did not believe this, I thought that there must be a catch, but so far I have not found one. We are not getting inundated with skype promotions; we are not being encouraged to use the cheap phone services to ring all over the world. As a family we have been able to keep in touch with our daughter on a regular basis and as a convert, like any zealot I want to tell as many people as possible about this great system, don’t believe me? Just skype it and see.
"It's a Wonderful Life"
(Thu 02/12)
TURN IT DOWN.
(Thu 11/11)
Do we need another Beatles book.
(Mon 11/10)
President or Pope, who is most welcome?
(Mon 16/08)
