Cellphone

According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 13% of cellphone users (and 83% of American’s own cellphones) use their phones to avoid face-to-face communication with others around them by pretending to be gabbing on their phones. This strikes me as brilliant, probably the best use of a cellphone that I’ve ever heard of. Now I’m someone who’s only had a cellphone for two and a half years and only occasionally use it as an actual phone, maybe making only a couple of dozen calls in those two and a half years and taking only maybe half a dozen (I don’t have that many friends, and I’m retired), using my iPhone mostly to check the weather or my email or baseball scores. I currently have 408 anytime minutes, 5,000 night and weekend minutes, and 4,268 rollover minutes (minutes I’ve not used); I could probably talk for the rest of my life and not use up all of that time. (Not that I have anybody to talk with.) Or I could just pretend to, like the 13% in the Pew study, and accrue even more minutes that I’ll never use. When cellphones (or mobile phones, as they were first dubbed) appeared some 20 or so years ago, I thought they would be a boon to the crazies among us, in that instead of walking around the streets talking randomly to no one in particular in their crazy kind of way, they could now get a mobile phone (working or not), stick it upside their head, and talk away to their heart’s content, appearing to all the world as engaged and maybe even important, not whacky as a loon. Now it seems that more and more of us are adopting this strategy of masking our lunacy. And I have some 10,000 minutes to play the game. “Roy! What are you up to? . . . Great. How did the meeting with Ferguson go? . . . Really? Well, I’m sure he’ll come around. . . . No, I never did find out what that walnut was doing hiding out in my underwear. I’m booked on the next flight to Kuala Lumpur, though, to watch some TV. Talk to ya later.”