I
have mentioned a number of times here that I do not own a cellphone nor do I
intend to buy one any time soon, I will pass over the reasons for this ongoing
personal Luddism, except to say that if you notice that my continued lack of a
cellphone makes it impossible for you to call me whenever you feel like
disturbing me with whatever niggling little problem you are having at the
moment, and if you suspect that this unwillingness to listen to you chew my ear
off morning, noon, and night might be deliberate, indeed may even be the point
of my not having a cellphone in the first place, then in the interest of
personal verisimilitude I should say that you might be right.
I bring
this tiresome subject up yet again because Ms. B., a knowledgeable young woman of my acquaintance, has
evinced an interest in buying a new cellphone. This, in and of itself, is not
terribly important; people buy new cellphones all the time—I suppose that
suppressing the traffic in cellphones is impossible now, much as I would like
to try—but this new cellphone is for those people who not only want to take
their cellphones to the beach, but also take the pernicious little devices into
the water with them as well. This marvel
of aquatic telephony allows the lucky owner to call and annoy his friends and
neighbors as he lays on the beach in the south of France, a prospect most
vacationers look forward to whether they want to admit it or not, and it also
comes equipped with an excellent camera and Internet capability. These amazing
and, one assumes, very costly extras permit our peripatetic caller to indulge his
hopefully temporary bouts of summertime sadism, wherein he tells his
unfortunate acquaintances who are not lying on the beach in the south of France
enjoying the fun and sun of their misfortune, and then further complicates
matters by sending these same unfortunate wretches photographs of what they are
missing. They will ooh and ahh and say
isn’t the south of France beautiful this time of year and tell him that they
hope he is having a wonderful time, and they will be calling him nine different
kinds of rotten bastard after he hangs up; people are like that, you know. His friends, assuming that they are still his
friends after he calls, do not want to have their noses rubbed in his good
fortune.
As
for me, I don’t really see the point of taking a cellphone into the water with
you, unless you want it nearby so you can call a lifeguard and let them know
that you are drowning. The problem, as I see it here, is that by the time the
lifeguard figures out what you are trying to say between the screams for help
and the frantic gasps for air, you’ve already drowned and the whole exercise is
therefore pointless, and to make matters worse, you’ve lost your cellphone
too. Assuming that you
haven’t drowned, you are now stuck in a
place you will now permanently associate with a traumatic near death experience, and not
in a positive manner either. This may or may not be a good thing; you will
never go back to the beach, but your local ski lodge will appreciate your
business, at least until you cause an avalanche and lose your cellphone there as well. Faced with being cellphoneless for perhaps the first time since the invention of cellphones, you must ask
yourself, what do I do now?
Clearly, you will have to replace your cellphone, and having spent
more than you really should have to get the first one, you may not feel the
need or have the means to buy another waterproof wonder phone. You may just
chalk this one up to experience and tell yourself to buy a new and cheaper cellphone
that you won’t be tempted to take into the water. After all, you can’t lose your phone in the
water if it's not in the water with you, but this, of course, requires
that you learn from experience, which is something most people are loath to do
until the Internal Revenue Service makes it necessary. And what of all those people you want
to talk to and who have nothing better to do with their time than talk to
you? Well, they will just have to wait,
won’t they? You’ll be doing something
more important with your time. What that
something more important with your time might be is entirely up to you, but whatever
this something more important is it had better not require my looking at any
pictures of the south of France that don’t have me in them. Do something else with the damn thing.
This,
however, does not solve the problem of the missing cellphone, which, because it
is waterproof, is still usable, even if Saint Anthony of Padua is the only
person who knows exactly where it is.
This could still be an expensive proposition, though. For example, you might open your telephone
bill at the end of the month and find out that you have made phone calls to at
least eighty-five people in Australia and twenty more to people in Astoria,
Queens. Upon investigation, and you will investigate because you are not paying
a two thousand dollar phone bill, no way no how not going to happen, as you
maniacally screamed at the telephone company’s payment department’s somewhat
English-speaking representative in Bangalore, you learn that a Greek fisherman
slit a bluefin tuna’s belly open somewhere off the coast of Crete and out fell
your now not lost cellphone, and he promptly used it to call all of his
relations everywhere in the world. And then he looked at porn, a lot of porn,
more Greek porn than you ever knew existed, which only proves that you don’t
get around very much and that fishing is a very lonely business.
And this
is just the best-case scenario. What happens if something else uses your
cellphone? Dolphins, for example, don’t
have access to a phone most of the time, but when they do, they enjoy using
their prehensile penises to make obscene phone calls to female police officers,
especially in California; why California faces this problem more than other
places is the subject of ongoing research, but early and very tentative results
from a UCLA study suggest a linkage between obscenity and police pensions in
that state. Most fish have no use for a phone, cell or landline, but hermit
crabs will have no compunction about using your phone to call their
realtors. The fight for better
underwater housing is Darwinian in its intensity and the recent housing crisis
doesn’t seem to have affected the hermits’ race for new and roomier homes; they
want what they want and they’re going to get it no matter how far in debt they
have to go, an attitude I’m sure the bankers loved just a few short years ago,
but one that few people can afford nowadays.
That the hermit crabs still act this way shows how economically
unrealistic some species can be, no matter how awful the market is. As P.T. Barnum didn’t used to say, there’s a
suckerfish born every minute.
Labels: cell phones, digital cameras, fishing, France, Luddites, lunch meat, photography, Roberta Vasquez, technology, telephones, zombies
