Say again?

Back when wireless internet networks were complicated, expensive and rare, they were usually to be found in commercial spaces. Geeks developed a secret code called war chalking to inform other geeks of where they could get free wireless internet. These days, mobile devices that can access wireless internet can also detect wireless networks but back in the day, you’d need some savvy software and a Pringles tube. It’s true, the Pringles tube, an aluminium cylinder, was a sort of cross between a metal detector, a radio triangulation device and a dousing rod. Quite how you mashed it up with your heavy-as-a-housebrick old school laptop I have no idea, but I bet chewing gum was involved.

So, geeks would prowl the streets, detect wireless networks with no security passwords and would then chalk on pavements or walls that a network was available. The war chalking was evocative of the secret signs that American vagrants would leave outside the homes of folks during the recession, signs that could be interpreted by others such as ‘food for work available’, ‘angry dog here’ or ‘wireless network will be available here next century’.

There have always been secret signs. The problem with most of them is that they are a one way thing. One by sea, two by land may be all very well, but does it allow for the recipient of the message to send something back along the lines of ‘I am standing on the beach frantically waving my towel because my cover has been blown and I want to come home right now!’? Possibly not.

Railways, of course, have plenty of signals. Famously, when they go wrong or don’t work at all, this can lead to problems. Just this week some criminals decided to steal a load of copper wire. The problem was that it was live and providing power and information to loads of trains that were supposed to be leaving Waterloo. The result was a lot of inconvenienced commuters. But signalling equipment is notoriously delicate. For instance, it freezes when, er, the temperature drops below freezing. Obviously the design geniuses who keep a national network of thousands of trains running simultaneously are too clever to consider slathering the signals in gose grease between November and April to ward off frosted signalling.

More informal signals have been spotted on the platform of the station I commute from this week. The mysterious message sent via strategically folded chocolate bar has been added to. A lone wrapper has appeared adjacent to, but quite separate from, the original wrapper totem. This, I think, is some sort of coded conversation. What does this new reply mean? Could it be an invitation, a warning or simply somebody thinking that this is how we dispose of wrappers now?

Whatever it means, the effect is that in addition to having to run in a manner so undignified it makes a squid being fired out of a cannon into a brick wall look like an exercise in coordination just to catch my train, I now have to build in time to se if any new ‘message’ has been posted.