You know what’s Crazy? I’ll tell you what’s Crazy!
Being disconnected in this very connected world.
I went to an amusement park called Holiday World.
The park is in Santa Claus Indiana on Rudolph Blvd.
Yes, Rudolph, the red nose reindeer, Blvd.
How cheesy is that?
As always, I had my trusty cell phone strapped to my belt.
As many of you know, I am that lone guy the president of Sprint talks about when he says, “Nobody still uses a phone JUST to make phone calls.”
LIAR! I am that guy. I am him. They made that commercial for me. I had a cell phone that did one thing and one thing only. Make phone calls.
I am like your grandfather and I did walk 5 miles to school every morning and shave with a sharp stone. More on that later.
Unlike most of you reading this right now, I don’t have a smart phone. I have a phone that is stupid like a rock. It doesn’t take my temperature and coddle me when I’m upset or make me warm milk to help me sleep. It doesn’t collate my email and give me an app to see if I am bringing sexy back.
It was and always has been a work phone, on the lowest possible rung of the “here are your options” ladder of technology.
Texting? Nope. apparently the extra 3 dollars a month was out of my company’s budget?
Picture taking capabilities? Why would I need that? I am only a reporter who has to drive to terrible stuff all the time and then do a “phoner” live on tv. Why would it be beneficial to be able to take pictures with my phone and email them to the station and then talk about what “we” are all seeing? Naaaaa. I’m a word smith. I will just describe the apartment fire with my mouth because my mouth is the the first level of interconnectivity. More on that in later editions of That’s Crazy.
Anyway, old faithful was clinging to my belt. It is in a leather pouch that makes me look like a life guard with a fanny pack. So I am on the roller coasters wearing this dinosaur of telecommunications. The ride is called The Voyage, voted the number one roller coaster in America. By whom and when, I have no idea. Regardless this contraption is a bat out of hell. It is a rolling boxing match and dentist attached to a track. First it rips out your fillings by banging your head against the steel car at 80 mph. Then it punches you in the face repeatedly with more G forces than a Blue Angle Pilot with palsy.
As I got off this vomit machine, and put my testicles back in my pants, I made sure to check for old faithful.
“Yep,” I smiled. She’s still there, clinging to my belt with a kung fu grip.
And so it went, ride after diabolical ride. Get off and check to see if my phone is on my belt and move on. Stick and Jab, stick and jab, for all you boxing fans.
That’s me and my cell phone. It’s a relationship cultivated over 14 years. For 14 years my company has supplied me a cell phone. For 14 years they pay for the service, the calls, the upkeep. It’s a work tool to me. But over time, my cell phone and I developed a relationship that only a man and his digital mistress can understand.
My first phone was so big you could advertise the face of missing children on the side of it. I looked like Maxwell Smart holding my shoe-phone to my ear.
But over time that old shoe phone model broke and I upgraded to the next best thing. As the years passed, my phone decreased in size, while the technological possibilities increased. But still I was a Model T in a parking lot of Ferraris.
While others were navigating smart phones creating MTV videos and conducting air traffic control with their PDA’s; I was mired in the stone age. It was 2005 and I was still making calls using two coconuts and a string. My kids were texting Jesus in the grave while ordering pizza from Milan, all while programming their satellite radios stations to only play Buck Cherry.
The iphone, and the Blackberry and now the Droid were the latest greatest innovations on the market place.
The world had gone from the Flintstones to the Jetsons over night.
Still I am wearing a battery operated paper weight on my belt.
Texting and picture taking and video playing and YouTube and email. All of it in the palm of your hand.
Not me.
I am alone.
My wife smirks as she plays on her iphone. FaceBooking and texting and shopping on line. She smirks because her iphone was suppose to be my iphone. I told her that I wanted to get one, and suddenly, like a back alley drug deal, she is opening up a box full of Steve Jobs’ greatest invention. She tells me that I can use her iphone whenever I want, but the first time I tried to pick it up, she snapped at me. You would have thought I was trying to look into the Arc of the Covenant.
My kids are no better. They laugh that I am a technological dinosaur who cannot text.
“All you do is write anyway, dad. Who would want to text you.”
I am out in the technological cold. Me and my paperweight of telecommunications, shunned, and ostracized.
My Vegas buddies want to send me jokes or pictures, but they cannot.
“When you gonna get a smart phone dude?” Gonzo will snap while asking me why I wore that color pants with a striped shirt.
I resist the temptation to fight them like a badge of honor.
Smart Phone? That’s for sissies.
I am the Clint Eastwood of telecommunications. I ride through the informational waste land on a text-less horse, in a dust storm of 4-G nothingness, wearing a poncho made of analog buttons.
Well there’s a new sheriff in town.
After a dazzling day of rides that lose fillings. After a day of walking miles through zones called Fourth of July and Halloween and Christmas. After a day of dodging bikini clad, tattooed scuzz humans, so repulsively fat that their thighs rub and they have a constant layer of powdered sugar on their faces. After a day of all this…
Something happens that has never happened in my 14 year relationship with my cell phone lover.
I feel my waste band suggestively. One, I like to touch myself, and Two, I like to check to see that my baby phone is still there. I mean
why wouldn’t it be? It has been for 14 years. Through floods and hurricanes and fires and riots. That cell phone or its predecessor, has always been hanging on my hip like a soldier, weary yet battle ready.
Suddenly I am alone. A bride left at the alter of telecommunications.
My mind went into shock and panic. I began looking around everywhere, retracing my steps in my head and in my reality.
“Do you know where my cell phone is?” I asked the wife.
“Isn’t it on your hip?”
“AC lost his cell phone that is always on his hip,” she types in her facebook account that am not allowed to see.
I cast her a glance.
I check lost and found. They pull out a box of cracked sunglasses and phones that look like they have worked a 2nd job as roadside bombs in Afghanistan.
“Thanks,” I tell the lady who could care less.
I check my suitcase? Why would it be there?
I check the car? How would it be there?
I check behind the toilet? Impossible right?
I check the suitcase again. Maybe I forgot how to look through a suitcase the first time.
I check the car a 2nd time. You know it is a large space consisting of front seat and back seat. Maybe I missed it the first time.
There’s that toilet again…
And so it goes for the next 3 days.
The wife texting to her secret legion of people, including her own kids who are only a room away.
The daughter talking lovey dovey gobbleygook in a strange code of LOL JK (just kidding) with her boyfriend of 1 or 2 months depending on what FaceBook says.
My son is updating his FaceBook status from I am bored to I am hungry.
Even my 11 year old is texting his soccer pals about the world cup.
All of their heads are down in the cabin, illuminated by an eerie incandescent light that seems to hypnotically control their minds.
Then it hits me. It hits me between the eyes.
As I sit in the 400 square foot lodge, on our last night, I realize I have not made a phone call or received a phone call for more than 48 hours. I cannot remember the last time I was this out of touch with the world.
In a world of 4 bars, I was living in ZERO bars.
While the family was dancing on the internet, I was watching daddy long leg spiders make babies in a cob web brothel.
At first I was going through with drawls. It was the kind of feeling you get when you need a cup of coffee, but you haven’t had a sip of caffeine for hours and your head hurts.
Who is trying to call me? Who do I need to call?
But as day one slipped into day two and I watched the zombies type in the eerie glow of the 3G hypnotic field, I began to feel more at ease.
I suddenly began to feel the noose of telecommunications loosen around my neck. Instead of a burning in my chest, I was feeling a cool wind in my hair. Maybe my phone is ringing somewhere in a lost and found box or at the bottom of a roller coaster track, but you know what? I didn’t care.
I felt free and somehow more human. Instead of asking the Google God to tell me what clean air smells like, I simply breathed it in, letting it fill my lungs and mind.
The feeling of equanimity was startling and welcome. though I must admit, I was experiencing something that amputees reportedly feel after losing a limb. I swear that my hip, where I kept old faithful, was vibrating and I was trying to answer my belt. I must have done it a dozen times.
Now a strange telecommunications cross roads has presented itself to me.
I reported my lost cell phone to my station. It turns out, after 14 years of fighting in the communication trenches, I am eligible for an upgrade.
Oh my God! An upgrade to the 3g or dare I even say it, 4g network.
I might be able to “communicate” in this rarefied air of superiority where people walk staring at the glowing box in their hand while tweeting about their intestinal maladies?
I am scheduled today to go to the holy shrine of digital influence.
The Verizon Store.
My saleswoman named, Brandi is going to let me test drive a Blackberry.
“It’s like holding a computer in your hands, sugar,” she says in a southern sales drawl so sweet, you have to wipe the residue out of your ear.
I’ll let you know how this all goes.
I feel like the Phoenix of antiquated cell phone technology, flying too close to the digital sun, only to crash and burn and be reborn in a signal so encompassing, so information-rich, I will surely emerge with God’s personal cell phone number.
I will of course make God number 2 on my speed dial.
Who is number 1? you wonder.
I will keep that to myself for now.
Hopefully nobody is looking over my shoulder as my Blackberry ferries me away to destinations only accessible in a sea of Al Gore’s wildest imaginations.
And that is crazy.
And suck that 3g losers!