A few weeks ago I wrote a very heartwarming piece about giving my wife my iPhone 4 when her's died. It was very nice, people wept and love won. One day someone will write a song about it, I'm sure. At the time, I thought it was no big deal. I'm a child of the 80s after all. I grew up with the modern day equivalent of tin cans and a string. Surely I don't need a smartphone to function in society.
Those were the longest two weeks of my life. Every time I came home I felt like I emerged from a cave or something. I needed a fix, another hit, from the internet. It didn't take long to grovel at the feet of an Apple employee and get a new phone. What happened to me? You have to understand that it took a feat of Hercules to get me to buy a cellphone in the first place. Electronic leashes, I used to call them. I got my first one in 2002 at the behest of my girlfriend at the time. I went to the Sprint store where one of their sea-witches made me sing into a seashell in exchange for a phone and the contract from hell.
Back then you got like 25 daytime minutes and 18000 night minutes. The only thing I hated more than the overage charges was the notion of being readily accessible to everyone. I enjoy my freedom and constantly being asked "Where are you? Can you do ____?" got old real quick. After going over my minutes for the third straight month, I called to cancel. The sad thing is that the termination fee was actually less than my average monthly bill.
Fast forward to today and I don't know what happened. I think it has less to do with the phone functionality and more to do with everything else. My wife and I have shared a 700 minute phone plan for the last eight years and have never gone over. We don't talk much on them. At first I thought the 80s baby thing made me impervious to the need for a high tech gadget. Now I realize that it's because of that era that I cling to it for dear life.
I grew up watching Penny on Inspector Gadget talk to Brain on her prototype iPad-book-thingamajig. Back then five-year-old-me was just happy to play with a solar powered calculator. "I wonder what happens when I put my finger over the solar panel. Oooh, it cuts off!" Minor leaps in technology from Tiger LCD Handheld games to Gameboy were viewed as milestones that wouldn't be exceeded until long after I was gone. The idea that not only would things get better, but they would be merged into one singular device was unfathomable. I mean, yeah it's a $500 phone but it's also a digital camera, a video camera, a calculator, word processor, voice recorder, portable video game console, music player, etc, etc, etc.
Do you understand that I would've sold half of my internal organs as a child for a digital camera? Am I the only person who remembers taking PERFECT pictures at school only to wait a week for "Peoples Drug Store" (CVS) to develop them and find out that the flash was off, my finger was in the way or it just looks bad? I remember when I first saw a digital camera. "You mean you can see the picture before you get it developed!!! How many kidneys does it cost? I probably should keep at least one, but I'll try to make do without them."
I have a lifetime of memories that no one could afford to rent a video camera for me to record. Now there's one on my phone. I can't even remember the last time I held a CD in my hand, let alone wiped one with alcohol and prayed that the laser could read through the braille-like scratches on the bottom. Every song I own is on my phone. My five favorite movies are on my phone. The video of my daughter's first steps is on my phone. It may be sad that we've gotten to a point where we feel we need to carry all of this around with us, but frankly I don't care. I enjoy it and I think I've earned that right.
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