What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? Recently I was sitting on a plane talking to a person whom I had just met. We were discussing our interests and experience and the subject of Amateur Radio came up. There was the obligatory CB radio comment and some discussion about marine radio, but the discussion boiled down to this: "What's the point?" I eased into the subject by observing that as a hobby I found it to be technically challenging without it having a direct relationship to my day-job in IT. We discussed the ideas that embody the hobby, non-commercial use, experimentation, discovery, camaraderie. We talked about the natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan and the subsequent issues with their nuclear power plant. I explained about making contacts and exchanging information, call-signs, signal reports, dealing with electricity and backup batteries and the like. The conversation went for about an hour, we talked about the SES, about HF long distanc