Way before we had handphones, smartphones and mobile apps to make things convenient, people actually used to talk over the telephone.
And when actress-model Sheila Sim was still a student, she used her house telephone so much that her grandfather kicked her out of the home.
On the latest episode of the meWATCH talkshow Hear U Out, the 37-year-old admitted to being a little bit disobedient when she dropped the bomb.
Image source: Screengrab from meWATCH / Hear U Out
She said: “He was fed up with me for using the telephone for hours every day. He warned me that people had trouble calling in because of me.”
In case you’re wondering, she was talking to her friends about “inane things”.
“The moment I got home from school every day, I’d call friends whom I had just hung out with. I’d ask if they saw anything interesting on their way home or were watching anything on Channel 8. We really talked like this,” she confessed, adding that she had a list of friends in case some of them weren’t available to chat.
As her grandfather was paying the telephone bills, he stopped her from using the phone.
But that didn’t deter Sheila who then used the public telephone, even stealing money from her grandfather to use the phone.
She said: “I disapprove of such behaviour. However, I was guilty of it.”
“He wasn’t particularly concerned about how much money he had. He didn’t know how much money he had in his pocket,” she added.
After being enraged by her incessant phone calls, her grandfather kicked her out of the house. Sheila “cried her eyes out” and she had “nowhere else to go” as that was her home.
Image source: Screengrab from meWATCH / Hear U Out
She shared: “My father was furious. My parents were divorced. My father felt my grandfather shouldn’t have kicked a child out of the house. He arranged for me to stay at another relative’s place for about a year.”
Describing her father as a “prideful man”, Sheila said he felt that she shouldn’t go back after being booted out. However, she was very close to her grandparents and would still visit them after school even though she wasn’t staying there anymore.
When speculating on the reason why she was always on the phone, Sheila attributed it to loneliness.
She explained: “Only three boys at home were around my age — my uncle, elder brother and elder cousin. They wouldn’t chat with me. Their interests were also different from mine. The only women [in the family] were my aunts who were more than 10, 20 years older than me.
“They wouldn’t chat with me either. I was usually left to my own devices at home.”
This article was first published on AsiaOne and republished on theAsianparent with permission.
Lead image source from Instagram / sheila_sim.
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