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| | Derrick vs. Cellphones | | | Sunday, July 13, 2008 (4:33 PM)
(I'm feeling aggravated) | |
I have a new cellphone. The silver kind. I paid extra for the whirligigs and blinking lights and features I'll never use... because I had to. It will "integrate with my previous cellphone," the punk behind the counter said. Previous cellphone? I haven't had a cell in years, and I told him that. "Oh," he said, "um, was it digital or analog?" I told him it was the black kind, which to my thinking, is undeniable proof of its age—the new ones are silver, after all. Something critical must be different. He dismissively concurred and bustled me out the door like I was a young Arab man in a lumpy parka.
So now it's sitting on my desk, flipped open, color LCD screen staring at me staring back at it. Neither of us is moving, any more than my fingers over these keys. Neither of us is blinking, and the world is starting to get dim around the edges; I wonder how long until it gives.
The last few years without a cellphone have been blissful—no one making my pocket ring in a movie theater or at a show, nobody insisting that whatever is pressing on their minds is infinitely more important than whatever I'm doing right now. When I absolutely needed to talk to someone… I went over to their apartment. Or I sent them an email, with proper capitalization and spelling, all the verbs agreeing and just the right amount of inside-jokes. Communication is an art form not to be wasted on static-y connections while driving with your knees and eating with your other hand. Save the multi-tasking for web surfing with your hand down your pants.
I walk down the sidewalks and see people glued to their cellphones, making AT&T and Verizon even richer, their eyes glazed and mind a thousand miles away in someone else's living room. They're the easy targets for petty criminals; they're the ones who hit squirrels and dogs and joggers with their cars, and just keep going. The world around them doesn't exist so long as they're plugged into somewhere else. I feel sorry for them, but it's that hostile sort of pity you give someone you don't like when they lose a finger to a table saw.
I suppose that those are some of the roots of my animosity for cellphones, but why I really hate the accursed things runs a bit deeper—I don't understand technology. My grandfather is convinced that the internet is just a fad, and though I count on it for my living, I'm not much more enamored with electronics than him. My last cellphone had the following functions: "call someone," and "receive a call." That's it—the bulky, black equivalent of a four dollar hard line telephone you plug into the wall… only I could turn my cellphone on and off. This new thing? I can do all sorts of strange whizbang maneuvers, like integrating phonebooks, storing and playing music, data transfers, calling Mahmoud Ahmadinajad in Tehran—collect… but I haven't quite figured out how to shut it off without throwing it against a wall.
All I need is to place a call, and receive a call. Everything else is useless, like tits on a bore or a busload of hippies. There are a thousand teenagers in this city who live and die by their cellphones, and have integrated them into the very fabric of their lives—into their DNA code, if they could. I just want to be rid of the damn things.
Great; it's ringing. Fuck them, they can wait; I bought that phone for my convenience. Not theirs.
Call me sometime,
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