Nudging with elbows blazing into joint first place alongside the Monday morning alarm clock, the most irksome noise around must surely be the ubiquitous ring of a mobile phone. In the same way that the alarm clock would be no big deal if it weren't interrupting the almost certainly fantastical outcome of my Helen Mirren-looking-fit-at-sixty-two-in-a-red-bikini dream sequence, the mobile phone would be no problem if it weren't so intrusive. Those ubiquitous cacophonies are everywhere – the Simpsons theme, a bit of Mozart, Jay-Z’s latest melody, and an entire teeth grinding repertoire of barking dogs, car horns, shrieks, clangs and indeed just about any din contrived explicitly to deliver the optimum level of blood-pressure eruption you care to imagine – insinuating their owners’ ringtone of choice from train carriage to conference hall, theatre auditorium to church service. 
And Lord help us, that’s just before the chatter starts! Usually consisting of nothing more conversationally crucial than "Hi, I'll be there in five minutes…" surely this is little more than superfluous, time-squandering. Yet it persists. Why?
Self importance would certainly appear to be key in determining the symptoms; the sense that not being constantly connected to the world leaves it vulnerable to catastrophe. Nonetheless, there’s a compelling counter argument. Umberto Eco, contemporary philosopher, essayist and best-selling author of The Name of the Rose, advances the theory that anyone who flaunts a portable phone as a symbol of power is, is fact, “…announcing to all and sundry his desperate, subaltern position, in which he is obliged to snap to attention, even when making love, if the CEO happens to telephone; he has to pursue creditors day and night to keep his head above water; and he is persecuted by the bank, even at his daughter's First Holy Communion, because of an overdraft. The fact that he uses, ostentatiously, his cellular is proof that he doesn't know these things, and it is the confirmation of his social banishment, beyond appeal."
So paranoia, also, should not be a motive easily discarded. Indeed, this phenomenon was brought home to me recently in the form of a piece of research carried out by CREDANT Technologies, who questioned over three-hundred city workers in a study to measure “mobile habits, leisure and security”.
With the credit crunch contraction giving way to job fears, it seems that many City employees will feel unable to completely relax on holiday this summer, worried that their colleagues will try to muscle in on their territory whilst their backs are turned. A whopping 83% of them admit they’ll be taking their mobile phone or blackberry away with them, with 65% confessing that they will make contact with the office, either by phone, text or email whilst on vacation. Furthermore, over a quarter of those canvassed also revealed that they will check their emails once a day whilst on holiday, with 14% admitting they can’t resist emailing more than once a day, and 18% will view their emails 2 or 3 times instead of taking the opportunity to relax and forget about the daily grind. In fact just a meagre 40% of workers are comfortable enough to resist the temptation to email the office whilst away on vacation.
 
1 in 3 will take their laptops with them!
As if negotiating the family suitcases through hectic UK airports in the height of the summer getaway isn’t challenging enough, more than 1 in 3 people will choose to haul their laptops with them too. From a security perspective the survey uncovered that a staggering number of these diligent workaholics were oblivious to the data security risks their roaming laptops posed as 1 in 5 don’t even bother securing the device with a password.
Commenting on the findings, (pictured) senior vice president and chief marketing officer for CREDANT Technologies said: “Whether it’s paranoia on the part of employees, or unrealistic demands from employers, the fact is that this summer numerous workers will be accessing the corporate network from all over the globe. If any of these devices are lost or stolen, and are unsecured, the cost of the holiday will pale in comparison to the cost of losing the data. Employers must face up to the fact that their employees diligence, or paranoia for that matter, could be putting the company at risk and it’s their responsibility to ensure the necessary steps are taken to protect the company’s crown jewels, it’s data, wherever it travels!”
 
It used to be said (in the far-off days when people had proper conversations which they would start in such a way) that unobtainability was time’s plague; of course, nowadays, the reverse would appear to be the case. And nowhere more rapacious is this phenomenon encountered than the seemingly insatiable advance of mobile communications. It’s something I was reminded of very recently when an email alerting me to a new innovation – well, how else am I going to stay connected with the world during my vacation (!) – no doubt the latest in an endless parade of such technological advances, each one rendering the previously indispensible must-have bit of kit even more obsolete than the last one, lit up my in-box with such brilliant exempli gratia of semantic tortuousness, that my head’s been resonating with it ever since. Get this; in describing a hand-held mobile phone-type thingie that picks up market info, the press release – whose source shall remain nameless – used the phrase "....a trusted part of the corporate ecosystem, offering advanced scalability features and time-critical data-streaming…"
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is I’m sure just the gizmo we need instantly to have at our palsied fingertips over the coming summer whilst peripatetically pondering the imminent collapse of the global economy. Putting aside the ironic readiness shown by the business world in appropriating ‘new-age’ language from the very zeitgeist it generally despises, whereby the noun ‘footprint’ to characterize a measure of human demand on the Earth's demands on the biosphere gives way to instead mean an organisation’s presence in the markets, weaving the word ecosystem into a context of such consummate corporatize really should earn its author some sort of prize.
So, as mobile phones combine with Palm Pilots to provide wireless web access – which undoubtedly proves invaluable for downloading the latest dollar-yen movements whilst pacing the vacation beachfront, I leave you with a vision of the internet, which according to Umberto Eco, represents an even worse epidemic than mobile phones. Coming across - for some reason - a website featuring a man who photographs his colon, Eco despairs: "Evidently we are dealing with a person to whom life has given nothing, not heirs to carry on his name, not partners drawn to his looks, not friends to whom he might show slides from his vacations, so he relies on this last desperate exhibition to gain a little visibility. In this, as in other cases of voluntary renunciation of privacy, lies an abyss of desperation that ought to persuade us to take pity and look away."

Sorry – that’s my phone ringing… do you mind if I take the call… after all, it might be Helen Mirren!