In Touch with Your World

Look around you these days. It doesn't matter where you are - the ballet, a museum, a ball game, the shopping mall, the doctor's office - those places or hundreds of others: it's the same wherever you go. Everywhere you turn, there's somebody talking on a cellular phone.

To me, it's a riot to see all the phones and pagers holstered up on people's belts like these folks were some kind of 21st Century G-Men or possibly Star Fleet veterans. My particular favorites are the people who have one set (cell phone and pager) from their place of work and another set for personal use. It starts to look like Batman's utility belt with all that hardware hanging on it. Holy Communication Revolution!

Just about everybody who gets a cell phone starts out by saying something along the lines of, "Well, I'm getting it for emergencies. You know, if the car breaks down or something, I want to be able to call a tow truck." Within a few weeks, you'll see that person happily tooling down the freeway without a care in the world, giddily yakking away on that "emergency" phone as they slowly creep over into your lane because they're too busy talking on the phone to notice where they're driving. Obviously, they aren't calling for a tow truck. "Well, I'm paying for the minutes. I might as well use them." And once you've got that cell phone habit, it gets very hard to kick.

I confess that I feel absolutely no compulsion whatsoever to be "never out of touch." I'm actually happy that there are times, such as when I'm driving or when I'm at a movie, that I can't be reached. Perhaps you think this makes me hopelessly old fashioned, a dinosaur in our modern world. A couple of weeks ago, while I was at work, one of my co-workers was trying to reach someone on a cell phone (in a building with HUNDREDS of regular-type phones in it!) and the damn thing wouldn't work. "Did you ever have a cell phone lock up on you like this?" he asked me, pushing buttons like crazy.

"I don't own a cell phone," I said to him.

The look on his face was a combination of wonderment and revulsion that struck me as terribly funny. But before I could bust out laughing, he beat me to it. "Man!" he said, shaking his head, "How do you get along?" I told him that I got along just fine, not a care in the world. How can you miss something you've never had?

Back in the early 80s, right about the time that the very first CDs were making their timid appearance among all those vinyl phonograph records and the AT&T monopoly was about to get broken up, an exciting new technology was just beginning to be talked about. It was decided that the new gizmo would be referred to as a "cellular telephone" because a small, fairly low-power transmitter/receiver could be put into a portable unit and the signal could be picked up by high-powered receiver/transmitters that would be arrayed at regular intervals among the buildings, hills or countryside. The edges of the ranges of these receiver/transmitters would touch or slightly overlap, so that as you moved about the geography you would move from "cell" to "cell," bringing about a truly mobile portable phone. Wireless phones weren't anything all that new. For quite a while very wealthy people had telephones in their cars, but there was no array of receivers, so the transmitter for the phone had to be pretty powerful, and it was still ultimately dependent on landlines.

Miniaturization took care of the problem of bulk. Very quietly, towers began to spring up in communities. They took up very little space, and they could be stuck in out-of-the-way places, so there was almost no objection. Besides, who would want to stand in the way of a revolution that would provide us with a means to be able to communicate with anyone at any time?

We've heard it said many times in our lives that "necessity is the mother of invention." I believe that cell phones are one of the finest examples of invention being the mother of necessity. In other words, this gizmo came along that few rational people would ever have truly wished for, and within the span of two decades that gizmo has become so ubiquitous that many people can't imagine what their lives would be without it.

Possibly you're wondering what I mean when I say that a rational person wouldn't want this thing. Well, consider this: How many of the people you know complain to you that they have too much stress in their lives? Have you ever told anyone that you have too much stress in your life? Could it be that we won't allow ourselves to be free of the burden of constant communication? No matter where we are, people can always find us. On vacation, in the car, at work, at night school or in daycare, no matter where we are, our workplace, annoying relatives, or chatty friends can always find us now. Do we really need this?

If you remember the old Woody Allen film "Play It Again, Sam," one of the better jokes in the movie was that the character played by Tony Roberts was constantly calling his place of work to tell them the phone number where he could presently be reached and any subsequent phone numbers, should they need to contact him. It was a very funny gag, except that now this guy is almost everybody. The difference is that the Tony Roberts character was a high-powered businessman with huge responsibilities. This is a quantum different that the seventeen year-old kid who walks by you at the mall yakking into a state-of-the-art picture phone with wireless Internet and e-mail. "Dude! I told you you'll never get to Level 24 unless you..."

I started writing this column months ago, but decided to shelve it when the Bush War Machine and the FCC blew everything else off the radar screen. It's a subject that, in my opinion, needs to be addressed before it gets out of hand. How can it get out of hand? Glad you asked. Since I first began this piece, there have been some new developments.

All television stations employ production assistants, and the one where I work is no exception. Except for the two supervisors, they are all part-time employees, so they receive no benefits. The work they do - sorting and distributing scripts for all newscasts and other productions, running teleprompter, floor directing, as well as any prop work or set dressing that needs to be done - is vitally important. But this is an entry-level job, and the pay reflects it. When things go wrong, they are often the first ones blamed. In addition, they pay union dues. It's about as little money as someone can make and still be able to say that they work in television. So I try to treat them with some respect, and I try not to use them as if they were my servants. If I have finished editing something that is shortly going to be on the air, I usually run it to the tape room myself.

A few days ago, though, I was in a crunch. I was just finishing up something that was due on the air in the next show, but had a complicated piece to put together for the show to begin only a half hour after that. I happened to see one of the production assistants, and he was carrying the basket of tapes for the next show down to the tape room. I had less than a minute left to be able to hand him a finished tape and spare myself valuable time spent running to the tape room and back. I looked out the door of the editing room and called his name. "Can you hang for just a few seconds...?" He didn't hear me. He was too absorbed in the conversation on his cell phone.

Nearly the same thing happened to me just this evening, but the situation was different. My wife needed some potting soil, so I dutifully headed off to the garden store to buy two 20lb. bags. I paid inside, and was told that the guy working outside would load it into my car for me. "Jason, customer pickup at the far gate," blasted over the speakers. I went outside and backed up to the far gate. No one there. I think you can see where this is heading. Jason was farther back in the covered area outside the store, hosing down the sidewalks and talking on his cell phone. After waving at him a few times to no avail, I decided it was easier to just load the damn things myself. After which I went over to Jason and handed him my pickup receipt. "Hate to interrupt your phone conversation. Here. I loaded them myself."

"Uh, sure." He returned to his phone. "So anyway, I was sayin'..." I'm sure he felt just like he was in a movie.

Maybe I'm hopelessly old fashioned, but I think that's rudeness and self-absorption at a level that really ought not to be acceptable. I have a theory about that, though, and it goes like this:

Every generation pushes the limits set by the elder generation. And just about when the elder generation gets to a point where it throws up its hands and says "Look at the horrible state the world's in today," the younger generation decides that they've reached a level where they're comfortable. After that point change - and acceptance of change - is less welcome. Of course, about that time, that younger generation becomes the older generation, and the cycle repeats.

I think, though, that my generation may well be the last generation where most people feel that the measure of a person is more than how much money they have. Maybe the last generation to have any real grasp of the concept of "privacy," too. Cell phones are part of that erosion of privacy. (The Internet, of course, is another, but we all know that, don't we?) If you have a cell phone with a GPS that tells you where you are on the globe, then probably lots of other folks may also know where you are on the globe. This may or may not be a good thing for you. But it doesn't seem to be much of a problem for most people, especially not my ol' pal Jason.

What started off as a novelty and later became a convenience has now become an omnipresent fact of life. Anything that you carry with you all the time will eventually become a burden to you, in my opinion.

Maybe someday not too far off, when a child is born, that child will be issued a number, and that number will be the phone number that he or she will carry with them for the rest of their lives. When that day comes, I'll be even older and crotchetier than I am now. And I'm sure that I'll be the object of much derisive laughter for thinking that those will be some very unlucky children indeed.

(C) 2003 - Karl Cable