The Day the Screens Went Blank Danny Wallace (best summer reads .TXT) 📖

Skyping is the best solution for Grandma because it makes him feel less guilty. I don’t understand why he feels guilty because I think Grandma must be delighted. She always seems happy, even at the end of our Skype calls, when Dad has to quickly leave to reply to an email or Teddy starts to play Roblox or Minecraft or Mum drifts off to do her work stuff. I’m always the last one speaking to Grandma, so I get to end the call, which feels important. But now there’s no Skype.

Mum seems really worried about Grandma, and I seem to catch some of that worry off her. Suddenly we all feel a bit helpless. Mum says Grandma’s got no way of getting to the shops on her own and she will only shop using the supermarket delivery van, which she can’t arrange without the computer. I had to give Dad a shocked look earlier because I overheard him joking that it would be the posh people who’d die out first because they’d be the ones standing at their windows, waiting for a van that would never arrive. Anyway, he says he’ll phone Grandma in the morning.

‘How?’ says Mum.

Dad looks at his blank phone and says that’s a good point. We don’t have one you can plug into the wall any more cos Dad realized it was cheaper to use wi-fi.

Then he says he’ll just ask to use Sandra from next door’s phone. She’s still got an old one, just like she’s got that old cooker and that TV that isn’t flat. It’s too late to go round now, he says, but he’ll ask tomorrow.

But poor Grandma, all alone in that massive, creaky old house. With all those creepy suits of armour. What if she goes in the garden and gets lost in her own maze? She might be trapped there now!

I go to bed concerned that this is a very bad time indeed to be a grandma.

The next morning we all go into Sandra’s and look at her phone.

Her phone is mad. It’s got a big, thick curly wire, and it’s green like a tortoise. Green! You have to put half of it up to your ear, and listen through a big round speaker. Also, to dial a number you have to put your finger in a slot and twist it round. It takes so long to dial someone’s number you could probably walk round to their house quicker.

Anyway, to stop feeling helpless, we’re trying to actually do something.

‘Okay,’ says Dad. ‘Let’s call Grandma.’

Mum sits down at the table with a cup of tea and says, ‘Go for it.’

Dad stares at the phone, and then he stares at Mum.

‘Right,’ he says, ‘so what’s her number?’

‘Oh,’ says Mum, and she picks up her phone to find it, and then says, ‘Tsk!’

Grandma’s number is stuck in Mum’s phone and Mum doesn’t know it off by heart. I get that. How could you be expected to know it off by heart? It’s like twelve numbers or something. And Dad doesn’t know it either. Usually you just go to G and press GRANDMA.

Mum once told me that when she was a kid, the way you kept all your phone numbers was to store them in your head. What a waste of brain space! You’d have an address book, she said, or maybe a thing on your fridge with all the phone numbers on, but you never took it anywhere. So if you were out you just had to remember everything.

HOW?

How could you store all those numbers in one noggin?

Oh, I’d better phone Paul: 9307896234!

Oh, I’d better phone Sam: 50 50 50 2 billion and 3!

And then you had to go and find a phone to actually do all that on!

Were people ROBOTS back then? Or was there just nothing to do except remember numbers? Half the phone calls people got back then must have been wrong numbers.

Then Sandra has an idea. She says there’s that number you can ring to ask someone else to look up a number for you, sort of like a speaking internet. We crowd round the phone while Dad rings it.

A woman answers and Dad says, ‘Hello, can you look up a number for me, please?’

And the woman says, ‘I’m afraid that our screens aren’t working so I can’t look anything up. I don’t really know what I’m doing here actually.’

‘Oh,’ says Dad.

And then the woman says, ‘I don’t suppose you know the number for a taxi?’

Dad did his best but it turned out the woman was in India and he’s never even been.

So we can’t phone Grandma and we can’t text Grandma and we can’t Skype Grandma and we can’t email Grandma.

‘We could wait for Grandma to ring us?’ says Mum.

‘But Grandma might not even know anything is wrong,’ I say.

‘Well, I guess we’ll never speak to Grandma again,’ Dad says. Mum gives him one of the Looks she uses when Dad does one of his jokes. But really he’s just tense because he knows Grandma might be scared and waiting for him to call.

‘What about writing her a letter?’ says Mum, after thinking for a bit, but Sandra says her son Eric has a friend who says the Post Office is going to be shutting down from tomorrow while it works out how to do things without screens. This just makes us all the more worried about Grandma. What if she’s just sitting there, on her big chair, staring at the door, all alone, without even a visit from the postie?

‘Well,’ says Dad, finally, ‘I guess we’re going to have to go there.’

‘What about work?’ says Mum.

‘I can’t do any work.’

‘What about my work?’

‘You can’t do any work either.’

‘What about school?’ I say, and they both look at me.

This is all such great news.

They never cancel school! Even when it snows loads, my school seems to be the one school in the country where everyone is like,