I have dad's telephone bill in front of me.

The bill covers twenty-eight days and it comes to $85.76. This seems a lot for a landline, but I think it includes his 'always-on' Internet connection. It is hard to tell, since the plan he uses seems to be obsolete - it is no longer advertised on the phone company's web pages.

The bill is interesting for several reasons.

  • He (since mum does not use the phone at all) made 54 local calls. The majority, perhaps all, of these would have been to Greg and Regan.
  • There was one long distance call to Rachel. This was made by the nurse who was looking for someone to whom to report mum's anger one day. She had been answered by recorded messages when she called both Greg and I. Mum and dad don't call Rachel, they rely on her calling them.
  • There were 81 calls to mobiles - all of which were to me. So here I have an objective idea of when, for how long, and how often dad calls me. His 81 calls had a total duration of 1 hour 6 minutes and 36 seconds, an average of about 50 seconds - so you can see that we don't spend a lot of time nattering. The mobile calls cost him $49.21 - not cheap.

Here's a frequency table of dad's calls to me:

Number of calls per day      How often this happened in twenty-eight days
                    0                        five times
                    1                        four times
                    2                        three times
                    3                        twice
                    4                        six times
                    5                        four times
                    6                        once
                    7                        once
                    8                        once                                                               

I have the impression that dad is calling me all the time, but obviously this is not correct. I think a reasonable number of calls per day would be anything up to, say, three on a busy day. The number of days that fit within this level of activity is 14, so for half the time the call frequency is reasonable, by this definition. There were five days on which he didn't call me at all. I have to say that these silent days usually pass by unnoticed for me.

The earliest call was at 6:54 am, the latest at 7:03 pm. This is a good reflection of dad's day. I know that he sometimes wants to call earlier than 7 am but he waits until what he considers a reasonable time to call. He is still aware that he gets up much earlier than most people. The fact that 7 pm is when he stops calling is an indication of the end of the day's events. Nothing happens in mum and dad's house after this time.

To put this in context, a couple of years ago I would get no telephone calls from mum or dad. My visits every week or two were sufficient contact in those days. Dad could either handle things himself or they could wait until we could speak fact to face. In the past, when I was working overseas, it would not be unusual for several weeks, even months, to pass without any contact between us. Things are certainly different now.