A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If we’re being honest, we’ve all done it — received an anxious or passive aggressive phone call before we’ve set out for a scheduled meeting, wondering where we are and if we’re far away. And the standard reply or text is three simple, but untruthful, words.

“On my way.”

Strictly speaking of course it might not be a lie at all, because this depends how you define being on your way.

For most people, it means being actually en route to your assignation, but some may see the twenty minutes getting ready in the bathroom as the starting point of the equation.

Telling white lies is second nature to most of us, all the moreso since we all became contactable 24/7 via the mobile phone. Before that, we just weren’t contactable all the time and therefore we could go missing without a hint of suspicion about it.

But now we all have at least one phone and even if you don’t answer, some of those phones have trackers that give the game away on you — so those who have access to the tracker don’t need to ring you to know where you are because you’re a pin on their Google Maps.

We’ve mentioned the good excuses here before when you’re in trouble — I’m still at the Office (which happens to be the name of a pub) or I’m on a course (which you forgot to mention was a golf course) — but this constant connection means we have to be more creative than ever before.

And yet we’re as obvious with our lies as a child caught with both hands in the biscuit tin.

The network provider, Three, had a bit of fun with all this recently as part of a publicity campaign, concluding that we are in fact a nation of spoofers.

That’s because two-thirds of us have claimed to be ‘on the way’ when we haven’t left at all — and the figure is even higher among twenty to thirty-year olds.

The real surprise there is that they responded to a phone message at all.

Around 60 per cent of phone users have blamed a ‘bad signal’ to dodge a call — and the percentage here is much higher among women — when the reality is that there are very few blackspots left for phone coverage by now.