#83 Out of Touch

I admit I’m a little cranky about folks who spend too much time on their cellphones. I’ve tried to understand, really I have. But I’ve always been something of a loner and the thought of spending so much of my precious private time on the phone has all the appeal of grapefruit juice on a paper cut. But some people just can’t be out of touch. Maybe it’s a reflection of how truly lonely folks in our society are, that they feel they have to constantly be sucking on an electronic teat lest they be cast adrift in the churning sea of 21st century indifference. The existential angst suffered by folks of the last half of the twentieth century has been replaced by the pseudo-connectedness of the cyber-ized cellphone. You can call people from anywhere at anytime, or if silence is a necessity, say you’re taking a final and Professor Numbnuts isn’t looking , you can text message your friends and keep the warm fuzzy companionship alive. Not to mention get the answer on how Herbert Hoover’s disastrous heightening of protective tariffs really entrenched the depression of the 1930s.
So the cell phone revolution’s contradictory effects have been to bring some of us together, friend, family, in-network extended family, and drive some of us apart, people who are annoyed by people who need to be together so damn much they force us to eavesdrop on their boring and insipid lives. Because really, with fully 90 percent of all cellphone calls being made up of completely useless information and idle chit-chat, the rest of us are subjected to a constant barrage of low level noise pollution we’d really rather do without. Why is it, by the way, that cellphone users seem to be completely oblivious of how loudly they’re talking about Aunt Mabel’s gallstone removal, but suddenly get all conspiratorial and quiet when they start talking about their latest tummy tuck?
I’m convinced that part of the problem is technological. I’ve yet to hear a cellphone that matched a land line in clarity of audio reception. Every time I’ve ever used a cellphone, I’ve had to strain at the earpiece to distinguish what it is the person on the other side of the cell waves is saying. And so naturally, like we all do when we’re talking to someone we can’t quite hear, or who acts a little deaf themselves, or appears to be speaking a foreign language, we start to yell at them. The person on the other end may be hearing me fine, but if I can’t hear them it’s like some atavistic reversion to being on the other side of a distant canyon. I holler. I used to tease my grandmother because she would always shout into her standard issue Ma Bell black bakelite phone. “I can hear you Grandma,” I’d yell back over the din, “You don’t have a phone with a crank any more.”
“But I do have a grandson who is too cranky,” she’d fire back.
America, ya gotta love it.