Actually, I should say first off that this is not my first cell phone. I had a slider five years ago that I used maybe six times. Those times were widely spaced, because I was always losing either the phone itself for its charger. At one point, incidentally inside the Wal-Mart I now find myself working in, I spent several minutes trying to find a pay phone, having forgotten that I had a phone in my pocket.
Somewhen around our Disney trip the phone went missing for months, plural...except in order for something to be "missing" you have to miss it, and I barely noticed the absence. (If I couldn't remember I had a cellphone when I was carrying the bloody thing, why would anyone expect me to notice it gone?) It eventually turned up, but its charger had vanished in the interim and never was found. I said then (and maintain now) that our landline cordless phone had never once disappeared, and its charger happened to be the place you habitually hung it up.
"But Ken", everybody entreated, "you can only use a landline at home, and only to talk to people. With vocal cords, how so last century."
And I said, my life alone consists of being at home, at work, or in transit between the two. If I'm at home, my number is ___-____; if I'm at work (emergencies only, since I'm not paid to talk on phones), my number is ___-____; if I'm between places I'm probably on my bike and can't talk anyway. This isn't rocket surgery, folks. And we won't revisit the whole depersonalization of text versus voice thing. Oh, wait, we just did."
And so I lived quite happily and contentedly without that electronic appendage the rest of the world has sprouted. Per Wikipedia, there are almost as many cellphones as there are people alive right now, which is something my mind simply can not credit. Call it Canadian Syndrome: it costs so damned much to own a cellphone in this country that I tend to forget it's radically cheaper everywhere else, especially in the Third World.)
In light of Eva's unfortunate setback discussed a couple of posts ago, among other things, it became necessary for me to be reachable on a moment's notice. It also became necessary for me to put away childish things, in this case my strenuous objections to owning a cellphone, and go buy what I'd always considered a childish thing...a cellphone.
It's a simple iPhone 5C, 8 gigs, which translates to a little more than four gigs of useable space. That's plenty. I have a 64GB iPod for my music, and...honestly! This phone is for communication and nothing else. My plan simply won't allow it: if I try and surf YouTube or God forbid something even more data-intensive outside of a WiFi zone, I'll bankrupt myself in short order. And since the only WiFi zone I happen to find myself in with any regularity is my own home, well, I'm sorry, if I have a choice I'm going to apt for a 24" screen and real keys over that tiny touch-screen, every time. You people who use your phone in place of your laptop or desktop...I don't understand you.
I had several people tell me I should have got an Android. Several people: you may be right, but (a) the iPhone was what was cheapest (believe me, that's a virtue at the moment); and I (b) a Mac/iPod person already, so the learning curve wasn't too steep.
Oh, hell, who am I kidding, the learning curve is like Lombard St. in San Francisco:
Spider Robinson, one of my favourite authors, once wrote a story about a time traveller. Not your standard time traveller: this missionary had been unjustly imprisoned in a Third World country for ten years. Freed, he made his way back to his home town...and a culture shock that drove him to the edge of suicide. He'd been a minister, see, and after a mere ten years of technological change he couldn't recognize the world, had no idea of the spiritual trials and torments it now entailed, and after his ordeal he really wasn't sure he could believe in God anyway.
"We are all time travellers", Robinson says through his character, "moving into the future at the rate of one second per second." As fast as technology changes, and it's an ever-increasing pace...it's still a day by day process. People travelling at the normal rate have plenty of time to adapt, even now.
For those who....skip...by choice or otherwise, the adjustment is something of a struggle. By no means is it anywhere near as dramatic...but it is still surprisingly difficult.
Trying to text while navigating my way through the world is just one of the issues. I don't want to be one of those people who goes arse over tip into a fountain (or into traffic) while buried in his phone...and I WOULD be one of those people, given half a chance. So far I've managed to transfer between busses while carrying on two separate conversations via text (albeit at half the speed of smell). A small victory, but mine own.
I've discarded some of my old bugaboos about texting, now having texted something like five hundred messages amongst nine people. Others have been reinforced. It's not quite as hard as I had made it out to be, and my friends and family are courteous enough to move at my slow speed in a conversation, which really helps. The predictive text helps, too, although I do think it should have picked up on my habitual writing patterns by now.
While texting is a great way to keep in touch, it is spectacularly unsuited to a serious conversation. In some ways it's even worse than Twitter. At least on Twitter, you can use punctuation without having to access secondary and tertiary keyboards. Even though texting has no practical length limit, people act as if 140 characters is far, far too many, which leads to ambiguity and misinterpretation.
And autocorrect pisses me off. It hasn't attacked me very often, but when it does it invariably changes something I had right into something that's anything but. And I flatly refuse to send the message and let it make even more of an ass out of me than I am already. Back up, re-type, all the while imagining my conversation partner twiddling her thumbs...
The biggest surprise has been the number of strangers texting me. I get at least one a day..."sup u in town"..."hey weeby what u doin"...they seem to be addressing a whole bunch of different people. I'm waiting for a stray sext to find its way on to my screen...that will be a hoot and a half.
I do, I confess, feel that almost overwhelming urge to check the phone when I hear an alert. It bothers me that I can be so easily conditioned. Of course, until very recently I hardly ever did hear alerts--the default swooping tone that signifies an incoming text is very quiet and both the noise and the vibration are muffled by my Otterbox, my capacious pockets, and my attentiveness to whatever it is I am doing. I was called on my cell for the first time ever just this morning, and I had to figure out how to answer the damned thing. I know--that sounds insane. But when landlines ring, we've had almost a century and a half's conditioning to know that all we have to do is lift the receiver. If you have never answered a cell call before--and for all I know that applies to people who have owned a cellphone for years--you may not know you have to touch and drag a slider on the screen. First I held it up to my ear like an idiot...then I thought hey, I probably have to do something to open the line and I hit the single button at the bottom of the iPhone and that dd nothing and it was only then, with the phone jingle-jangling and vibrating merrily, that I thought I'd better look at the screen. My eyes zeroed in on the name of the caller (yes, I want this call) and frantically slid down the screen (the screen looked awfully funny with my eyes sliding down it) slide to answer SWIPE "Hello?"
"Hi, Ken, are you okay?"
"Yeah, why?"
"You're out of breath."
"Just"--don't say you got winded from trying to figure out how to answer your phone don't say just got winded from trying to figure out how to answer your phone--"ˆgot phoned trying to answer...the wind."
How I love the people in my life that hear things that inane and without missing a beat just skip right over them like I wish I had in the first place.
I know that there is a whole world of things I could be doing with this phone. I am hoping, quite sincerely, that it takes me several years at least before I crack and start exploring it. I like the world around me and I love many of the people in it. I already get far too much "online" in my life through this desktop. I really don't need more of it...
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