#972 Phone Home

Years ago, when the big earthquake hit the Olympia area, I worked at a store downtown. We were a little technology challenged. Or so all the young folks in the stores around us thought. We had an old-fashioned landline phone. The kind that plugs into the wall and where the handset stays wired to the base unit.
All our neighbors had cell phones and wireless phones sending tiny radio waves to base stations, which were plugged into—the power grid. Guess which phone still worked when the power went out.
Flash forward. My visiting son shows me his new phone. It not only remembers numbers, it’s got all kinds of personal data, saved directions to places, and numerous applications, each with their own memories of stuff. He decides to play his old drum set down in the basement. In the process of vigorously ripping off a multi-drum blaze of stick flinging, he accidentally smacks his front pants pocket with one of the drumsticks.
A personal 8-point Richter earthquake for the phone nestled therein. All his memories are lost. And many of his phone numbers that he didn’t save to his sim card. Because the phone has two memory storage places. The basic sim card and the larger memory card that stores everything else. The phone is shattered. Worse. He is also incommunicado. Having got used to 24-hour anywhere availability, now his ride back to Seattle seems more scary to me.
And all that memory. In the old days, we would have written important numbers down in the phone book by the phone plugged into the wall. It would have taken an earthquake and a house fire to lose it.
Phone books are amazingly resistant to errant drumsticks.
Flash forward again. I’m wrangling with my cable company and they need to reboot my modem. And I realize: I almost have to have a cellphone to communicate with them if my cable connection crashes. Fragile Technology is forcing us to depend on more fragile technology.
The phone I’m using to talk to them is doubly vulnerable. It’s plugged in to the power system and it’s plugged into the cable modem. And they’ll all crash in an earthquake.
Maybe I’d better practice shouting...
America, ya gotta love it.