By James R. Turner, FAAR, FASLA
My cell phone went dead after it complained of not being connected to anything. This process of dying took about three weeks. It seemed like self-inflicted wounds to me. For example, a pop-up would appear that said, “You are no longer connected to a provider service, emergency calls only.” All my calls are emergencies. For example, “Honey, have you seen my keys?” But seriously, are we being duped? These telephones today are presented as salvation itself and are actually basements full of computing power. Who’s running the show at my house, anyway? It ain’t me. The alternatives, an old-fashioned “land line,” are becoming more and more obsolete. Half the time they don’t work, or the only message you can get through is “my electricity is out,” and that is to a robot. What happened? Of course, you still get to pay them for the service, and somebody else had already notified the robot anyway. You are expendable. Without a doubt.
Well, the other day I went to make an important call. After failure to be able to use the phone because my battery was too low, and a proper charge cable could not be found — I swear, I thought I saw one somewhere! — I resorted to email. What a joke. It took an hour to find the right name for the guy I was trying to reach. People do the damndest things to get recognized by the World Wide Web. Where do they get these names, hang-on-sloopy.jones? A favorite one for myself is idiotturner@gmail.com. Very simple, no? The World Wide Web is properly named, a metaphor for an arachnoid. It’s the work of spiders. They got that right.
Am I wrong about the old-fashioned telephone? It did not require countless batteries that pollute our environment and landfills. There was a time when you simply paid your bill. Result: you made a telephone call. Nowadays you still get to pay your bill. For sure, but you must buy a device which costs more than my first Volkswagen. You then buy the batteries that maintain this amazing thing. Followed by and through your home electric bills, you provide for the device’s electricity, not cheap, then you care for it, like you are some sort of technician. I couldn’t fix an old one, didn’t dare, much less a new one, Holy Cow! Anyway, my bride switched the SIMS card from my deceased phone to hers and put her card in my phone for safe keeping. She is now our IT person.
Meanwhile a storm blew trees down and we were out of real electricity. Ever notice that when you need a cell phone the most, in a real emergency, like needing to know which way to run…clouds move in, and it starts to rain? The phone goes dead. Something to do with towers, clouds and satellites. That reminds me that I need to plug in this laptop or get fussed at by the little bar at the top with all its icons representing a language I somehow missed in elementary school. That’s another story.
Shut my mouth before I go nuts. To tell you how much I miss the big, fat phone books, deliciously full of white pages with everybody in it, their address, and their phone number, and those morbidly obese yellow pages that were totally useful, is to cry tears of super-duper proportions.
I had kept the party’s number that I needed to call on a sticky note. Good luck with finding that. So, I casually asked if my friend in crime, visiting with on another matter, as we do, if he might have the number in his phone? He is very organized. He did. I knew he would, grrrr….and I got it back onto another, second sticky note. Then using my newly-charged wife’s phone, with my SIMS card carefully inserted, I finally called the guy I had originally wanted to call. I got a recording.
Nobody wants to be scammed. But that is a subject for yet another day, “The anxiety associated with the use of the phone today”. A lifelong pal recently lost his house by a mortgage scam done entirely on the cell phone. I hear that setting up semi-device-free communities might be in our future. Lordy, what’s next?
