Nothing beats a 1980s brick phone

In the late 1980s, a story entered advertising folklore. A group from an ad agency had boarded an evening train from Newcastle to travel home from a client meeting. On boarding, they learned that the buffet was out of action, and they were hungry. Happily, one of them was carrying in his briefcase a wondrous new brick-sized device called a mobile phone. After a series of rebuffed calls, he managed to find a lone Indian restaurant in Peterborough willing to deliver to their train when it stopped en route to London; there our hero duly handed a wedge of cash through the carriage window before taking delivery of the food.

If the group were unpopular already (‘Hello, is that the Taj Mahal? I’m on the train. Hold on, you’re breaking up!’), I imagine they were utterly loathed once the aroma of fresh naan bread and chicken jalfrezi reached the noses of the other starving passengers. But they had a great story to tell.

Younger readers may be unimpressed by this. Trust me, at the time it seemed miraculous. Remember very few people had a mobile phone back then. There was no Deliveroo – indeed any kind of food delivery was rare. It would require some powers of persuasion to get a restaurant to deliver to a railway station. And so on.

Kids, forget the latest iPhone. The best phone you could ever own was a Motorola brick in the late 1980s. Let me explain why. Because it reveals a hidden problem with technology that we generally ignore until it’s too late.

Quite simply, the experience of adopting any new technology is the opposite of having children. Children are a massive pain to begin with, but 20 years later they finally become entertaining and useful; technology is often entertaining and useful to begin with, but 20 years later it becomes a massive pain.