OK, cell phones themselves are nice to have, but everything connected to them is a pain in the ass of the highest order. Can you tell I've been having a frustrating day? I'm working night shift this week, and it isn't agreeing with me. Daytime sleep feels so unwholesome, like I've been drugged, and it gives me nightmares. Then, since yesterday was my day off, I slept until 3:00pm, having worked all night the night before thinking I'd have to stay up late to stay on a night shift schedule, but I ended up falling asleep at 11:30pm and sleeping all night, so now I'm back on a "day" schedule, but I have to work all night tonight.
Anyway, last January we became a modern, technological family with cell phones for all, and it has been an endless headache. Everywhere, there are receptacles of water--the dogs' bowls, toilets--in which my children have dropped their phones, which causes the phones to act funny or die entirely. Not only that, they're buzzing and lighting up constantly, and I mean constantly. Our first bill showed we'd sent and received 50,000 texts. FIFTY THOUSAND TEXTS. And this month's bill had an extra $92 charge for "data" because Mad Scientist wasn't aware that it's not free to connect to the internet with your phone.
Now, Miss G's phone has died, mysteriously--no water involved--and we went to the Sprint store to see what we could do about it. Only we never got to actually talk to anyone because the associates were helping other customers, but when a customer finally left, the associate who had been helping him, and who had told us someone would be assisting us soon, disappeared. The other customer was having a very long and complex interaction with her Sprint associate, so long and complex that her pregnancy became visibly more advanced while I waited for her to finish. A different Sprint associate appeared on the floor and busily logged onto her computer, but she put up such a strong "don't approach me" vibe, she might as well have erected a force field around herself. It is not an exaggeration to say it was impossible to approach her. When I realized we had been waiting for nearly half an hour, I walked out. The same thing happened the last time we went to the Sprint store too.
Remember when all you did to get a phone was call the phone company? It would take about a day for them to set it up, and then you would call your friends and tell them your new number and they'd write it down in their address books. Remember when phones served solely as a means of communication and not as a device for storing information so no one fussed about losing their contacts, or needing "wireless backup" or whatever to be able to preserve their contacts because everybody had a HANDWRITTEN ADDRESS BOOK? As you did yourself. Remember that?
A while back I heard a story on NPR about how the practice of saving all your numbers on y our cell phone means that you no longer bother to memorize important phone numbers, and that this is becoming a problem for people who are arrested because when it's time to make their one phone call, and they don't know the number because they didn't memorize it because it was saved on their cell phone. I am sure that is a useful lesson for us all.
Comments (6)
Good point about the cell phones and not knowing phone numbers by heart....I've written my numbers down, thankfully. I had a very strange dream about a broken cell phone last night, it fell apart right when I really needed, just fell apart in my hands. hm.....
I still have a hand-written address book - and it has tiny slips of paper taped in it and flying out if it, and everything.
Your post reminds me of the book I read about young women going to work in the factories in China and moving from factory to factory each season. The author mentioned that the loss of a cell phone can be devastating - it can mean the end of friendships once one leaves a job, the loss of job contacts, even the loss of contact with a relative, since ALL contact info would be in the phone. Workers who lose their phones are literally alone and lost in factories and towns with hundreds of thousands of strangers, and they often have to just start their lives over. I had never considered that possibility.
Oh man, I hope I never get arrested. :)
I so agree with that last paragraph! I think all kids (well, adults too) should have at least SOME phone number memorized!!
I still have a handwritten address book, and I see that Tiff does too. Of COURSE she does! Throwbacks, unite! Good lesson re: jail. If you're planning to go to jail, which hopefully you're not, you should memorize some phone numbers. I drop a phone in the toilet about once every 18 months. It's so annoying.