In the days before office life was subverted by the cult of personality, your average working stiff was always looking for ways to be out of contact. Phones were left off the hook, smokers popped down to the mailroom, phantom meetings were arranged in mystery locations across town, time-serving professionals sat alone on park benches and secretaries were regularly entreated by semaphore to deny one's availability. That was in the lazy, hazy days before the mobile phone. Nowadays, being unavailable is understood to be an act of aggression equal to driving tanks through the walls of the Danzig Post Office. To fail to answer your mobile phone, or to turn it off completely, is merely to announce that you are deep in the throes of a secret life. You don't care, you're not reliable, you've got something to hide, you're screening. There are few modern crimes so remarked on as the crime of unavailability. Answer or you're evil. Answer or you're dead.

LRB 4 October 2007 | PDF Download