On Smart Phones

I own a smart phone but I don't use it. I use a stupid phone. The stupidest cell phone I could find: Motorola's FONE. Google it if you don't know what I am talking about. I bought it because it is a phone and that's all.

I don't like coffee makers with clocks in them. I own a clock and a coffee maker and I like it that way. In the words of Master Tsunetomo, "It is not good when one thing becomes two." I wanted a phone that was just a phone. Not a camera, not a calculator, not a computer, not anything other than a phone and FONE was as close as I could get.

Someone gave a a smart phone out of charity and, I think, the deep suspicion that anyone without a smart phone must be cripplingly poor. Or that not having one was wrong in a fundamental, existential way. But I don't use it because the manual is two inches thick and that just describes the functions. To learn how to use them you have to download a 15 GB pdf file. My life is confusing enough, thanks.

Everyone in the construction industry has a smart phone. Or at least a cell number. It is bizarre to encounter someone who doesn't. While I do have a cell (and consequently a cell number) I don't give it out to people I work with. For one thing FONE is too dumb to hook up to hands free (or I am too dumb and I am just blaming FONE). Most people's cards have their work number, cell number, alternate number, fax number (what? no telegraph number?), email address, alternate email address. Mine has my work number and the firm's mailing address. And my name spelled incorrectly.

I don't like the way cell phones make you permanently available to every single person who wants to reach you. I figure if my firm wants me to have a cell number, they should buy me a smart phone and teach me how to use it. I could then call it my "work phone" and turn it off whenever I want.
This is the thing with cell phones smart and stupid - if you don't answer it the person calling you will assume you are screening them. People who are not middle aged will probably not understand this but I have a few hours every day and at least one day a week I guard very jealously. In that time I don't want to see anyone, speak to anyone, or even consciously ignore anyone. I want to be left alone. And my being alone during that time shouldn't hurt anyone's feelings. I have structured my entire life to protect those precious hours of solitude. I don't have a wife / partner / significant other, or kids, or pets, or anyone who can reasonably demand my attention in that time. When my jobs demands as much time as it is now the only way I can protect my solitude is driving around (a poor substitute but what I am left with). A smart phone, or stupid phone I carried with me, would wreck that.

The cell phone has a very strange and unprecedented place in most people's lives. It is the first thing they grab in the morning and the last thing they put down. I misplace mine for days at a time.

So I am that guy who sits in site meetings without first putting my phone on the table. I never carry it with me. In some ways this is aspirational. When you are important enough you don't have to carry a phone - someone else carries it and relays the messages to you. Someone (I forget who) remarked no celebrity can dial a phone. They all have people who do it for them. They just say, "Get so-and so for me!" and they are handed a pre-dialed phone. I wouldn't mind that.

This isn't me saying, "look how special I am." This is me saying, "If you want to reach me, email" Kurt Vonnegut took a job at a University because they let him choose the writers who would be invited to a conference and he really wanted to introduce William Styron to Pablo Neruda. He and Styron were just leaving his office when Neruda arrived on the campus - some grad student picked him up at the airport. So Vonnegut introduces them and stands back. Let the magic begin! They say hello to each other and the conversation just collapses. Both of them are trying desperately to think of something to say and failing. So they start walking. About five minutes later Styron turns to Neruda and says, "So you're from Chile! It must be nice to come from a country to long and narrow."

The point is even really smart people say stupid things if you don't give them a chance to think first. Phones are a bad way to communicate generally and every extension of them makes the problem an order of magnitude worse. I am currently dealing with some severe fall-out from a conference call. Something that would never have happened if we had been emailing and will probably cost someone (but thankfully not me) about $60,000. I email. I'm good at it and I take perverse pride in that. And I want to do it from a big screen I can fucking look at, thank you.