Rafael Behr, of Observer blog fame, wrote an artful wee piece on tech etiquette for the first Observer Technology magazine.

In it, he argued we were all turning into rude buggers: interrupting face-to-face conversations to take phone calls and checking SMS messages in company. Maybe, he suggested, there would be a backlash.

“Meanwhile, as people continue to get richer, and everyone has the latest hi-speed miniature internet gadget, the leisure to communicate inefficiently will carry all the kudos. There will be a fashion for hand-written notes, delivered by footmen. Carrier pigeons will be the new BlackBerries.”

For me, the ultimate sign of the backlash having arrived will be the return of human announcements at railway stations. They’ve all but disappeared here in the UK, with some jobbing actor with a carefully moderated but somewhat jerky baritone, or a slightly aggressive woman with similarly deep voice, replacing the wonderful range of regional accents you used to get on railway platforms.

I commuted for four years – a 180-mile round-trip every day, an experience I can really only now begin to talk about. But I still can’t describe the frustration, the anger, the soul-searching, prompted by the sound of a computer generated voice telling you – a passenger who’s paid £5,000 for an annual season ticket: “First Great Western regret to announce that the… seven… oh… five service to… London Paddington has been delayed by… … … thirty… five minutes due to… a fault. First Great Western apologises for the severe delay to this service.”

The whole message was a blow to your gut, not least because the damned railway people had left it to a machine to issue their insincere apology. I mean: why bother? But the worst thing was knowing, from weary experience, that the “fault” was one of the engines breaking down, thus meaning you’d be running slow and late all the way to London – accompanied by a cacophony of phone calls as people tell their appointments: “I’m on the TRAAYN, and I’m running LAAYTE!”

“I know,” you’d think, “I bloody know”, all the while wondering why it felt like you were losing your mind.

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