octobre 2009 - aafi-afics - UNOG

I was about to start with the top left hand corner of my desk and I find I am still there. Well, the first item there
is a telephone. It’s ivory coloured, it has little buttons to punch in the number. How different from the first
telephone we had and which I remember well, even the number. It was fixed to the wall on the landing where
the staircase doubled on itself to go to the upper floor. If you were a child, you couldn’t reach the mouthpiece
so the instrument was safe from childish interventions. When you wanted to phone, you wound up a handle
on the side, you got a polite voice asking what you wanted, and you gave the number. I still remember our
number: Fukiai roku-yon-nana-ichi. This was Fukiai 6-4-7-1 in Japanese which happened to be the language
spoken in Japan where we lived.
That was in the 1930’s; of course my phone today is much more modern. It’s got buttons to punch in your
number; unfortunately you can hardly ever do this without accidentally pressing two buttons at one stroke,
But that’s a small price for being modern.
It has an answering machine so it can talk back and people can leave messages. These messages are
always too fast or too faint or too confused and leaves you none the wiser. Especially when they give you a
number to call back. By the time you find a pen and a piece of paper to note it down, your caller has packed
up and forgotten what he called about. And anyway the number has been uttered, or muttered, or stuttered,
so fast that you couldn’t have noted it, however many pens and pieces of paper you found.
The phone used to have a Fax attached to it but this died on me when I wasn’t looking. One day when I
returned from a holiday, I found that the whole roll of printing paper had unrolled and strewn the room with
New Year’s eve type of decorations, only colourless. Or like the streamers – very colourful - people used to
throw to their friends on shore when sailing away on a steamer.
Nothing for it but to lug the awkward, cumbersome instrument to the Swisscom shop. The most difficult part
of this was unplugging the phone and unravelling the tangled mess of wires: wires for the phone, for the
reading lamp, and for one or two other helpless machines.
Arrived at the shop only to find that Swisscom had moved. So another bit of lugging and tugging to get to the
new location. The supercilious sales assistant took one look at my phone/fax and pronounced it
unrepairable. You’ll have to get a new one. he said. This turned out to be relatively easy because they had
only one model that came in only one colour. How simple life would be if this were true of all the things you
need to buy !
Oh dear, where am I now? Here I am, back at the top left hand corner of my desk and my time is up. But
you see how difficult it is to keep your desk clean?
1 August 2009
Aamir Ali
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