I only found out last week that they’ve now come up with a way of changing your ring tone to the international single elongated beep variety – so that you can switch to it to help switch off even if you stay at home for your holidays.

And that’s brilliant because there’s nothing like that single long ring to make the person at the other end hang up – but if you holiday in Ireland and your phone sticks to the old ‘ring-ring’, the caller couldn’t care less if you were in the middle of work or a Banana Daiquiri.

The whole point of taking holidays should be to switch off – to not answer the phone, to not look up emails, to not worry about work, to not watch the news, to not talk about our economic woes, to get away from the drudgery of daily life.

And yet what do we do? We go to Spain and buy day-old English newspapers to keep up with the football; we congregate in Irish bars to watch an All-Ireland quarter-final that wouldn’t remotely interest us if we were at home; we surf the net and answer emails, paying a multiple of our normal charges to use the phone.

A recent survey in the UK found that the main reason we keep answering the phone and reading emails is that we fear losing our jobs – which is a bit fatalistic given that you’re only off for a week – or more commonly that we cannot face into the backlog of emails when we get back to the desk.

But given that even bog standard mobiles these days have internet access, we cannot even blame work for our addiction – it is almost an involuntary movement to take out the phone, hit the internet button and look up the football news.

It’s gone so far now that some psychiatrists in the US have now suggested that internet addiction – the legal sort as opposed to anything mucky – should be treated as a psychiatric disorder.
The problem is that you’d spend your time in a treatment centre looking up your emails so that you wouldn’t face the backlog whenever it is that you get out.

A generation ago, when we still relied on coin boxes, we rang home to check on the kids or the dog once a week before putting all of that to the back of our minds until the plane landed at Dublin Airport.

Now we go to concerts and when we hear a song we think everyone knows, we hold up the mobile phone on the general direction of the speakers so that some poor unfortunate can be bored with the muffled sound of a classic hit in their own home.

You only know how much you rely on your mobile if it breaks down; you’d sooner survive without your wallet. Because if it’s not for making calls or surfing the net, it’s for tweeting or looking up Facebook or taking photographs or playing games.

If we were right, we’d leave the mobile behind before going on holidays or at least take a mobile with a number that isn’t known to the office or anyone who rings you for work.

But of course we’d miss talking to them a lot more than they’d miss talking to us – and therein lies the problem.

So back to the ring tone idea; if they aren’t put off by the elongated American or European version and they’re prepared to hang on the line, they’re probably worth talking to. And they’ll be pleasantly surprised to find you’re still at home after all.

Of course if you do go abroad and they still ring you, you’ll have to pay more of the cost for the call than they will – but at least you can bore them with tales of sunshine and sangria as opposed to wind and rain.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.