I had my love affair with the telephone when I was in junior high in the latter half of the 1970s. You paid by the phone jack then, and our house had two: one in the kitchen on the wall with a corkscrew plastic cord that stretched to the floor, and one in the master bedroom sitting on a bedside table. We felt fortunate to have push buttons instead of dials, and life was good.
My best friend, Shawna, and I would talk, giggle, and sing for hours on the telephone, though our homes were only about a half mile apart down the street and across a school yard. I distinctly remember singing a Campbells soup commercial over the telephone: "How do you handle a hungry man? The man handler's!" We were the 'man handlers,' though neither of us had ever had a boyfriend. Oh, we laughed and laughed.
Phones were fun then and not complicated. If you were away from home and needed to call someone, you had to find a payphone and insert a dime for local calls, but that was no problem because there were payphones on every street corner and inside most businesses. Making a call from a payphone was a rare event. Almost everything could wait to be communicated until we were home.
I remember seeing my first cell phone -- a literal brick in size and weight attached to a self-important, technologically advanced co-worker's hip so that he could be reached anywhere in the event of an 'emergency.' (We were librarians, and I don't recall any serious library emergencies, but I guess we could have had one.) The first car phone I ever saw was in a BMW on 700 East in Salt Lake City. You could tell that the car had a phone because it had a little stinger above the back window. I was mildly impressed by the novelty of it.
But this phone thing has gotten out of control. Who really needs to be in constant communication, as though they or their potential callers are on life support of some kind?
I realized the phone thing had gone too far in the freezer section of my local grocery store where a man was talking in a loud voice (apparently to himself) about which vegetables to buy. The debate was getting kind of heated when I realized he was wearing a device of some kind above his ear and actually communicating with someone who was not in the store. What would have happened if he had brought home corn instead of peas, or both corn and peas? He was not authorized to make such decisions without placing a phone call.
I may be the only adult I know who does not want and does not have a data plan on a smart phone. The four other adults in my own household have the latest technology and wouldn't want to be without it, but for me the added convenience of having GPS and a digital phone book in my purse pocket holds absolutely no appeal. I have never used an app and do not want to. Something must be terribly wrong with me.
We pay handsomely each month for all of this instantaneous entertainment and information. There's never a dull moment when you can watch a movie or television or shop or read a book in the palm of your hand.
Maybe I've stumbled onto something here. I like having dull moments to think my own thoughts. I like the fact that if I want diversion, I have to go out of my way for it.
My co-worker with the prototype enormous cell phone all those years ago called it his 'electronic leash,' and that is how I see all of them. What marketing genius convinced civilized people everywhere that they must invest in high tech tech status symbol phones, then pay monthly for the privilege of using them?
In the interest of full disclosure, and since payphones have all but disappeared, I do keep a very simple cell phone in my purse in case of emergencies (my own or others'). A cell phone is a necessary evil.
