Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [60]
Not knowing who was on the other end of the line also injected a heightened sense of immediacy, excitement, and daring to a phone call. When the phone rang, it suddenly introduced the notion that everything in your life could change, for good or ill, if you just picked it up. Who could resist?
You’re hired.
You’re fired.
Yes, she’ll go out with you.
Someone’s getting married.
A friend is in love.
A friend is heartbroken.
Let’s make plans.
Someone is dead.
Someone important, maybe Dear Aunt Agatha, would call long distance during the dinner hour, hoping to catch us all in at the same time. It wasn’t an imposition; it was exciting. We’d take turns coming from the table to the phone and it was like having her there with us for supper. Each one would have a precious minute with her on the phone. And after she hung up, we would chatter happily away, like birds around the feeder, at all the news. The telephone was an instrument of the tribe, like the fire, the hearth, the dog, the car.
Well, anymore, Dear Aunt Agatha is dead, and it’s the corporateers who are calling, and calling, and calling.
The telephone has become more than a symbol of our accessibility. The home number is our virtual address, and marks us on the map of the world. The phone is a gateway to our private lives. We enjoy the illusion of having some control over who knows how to find us, but we know that isn’t true. Your home phone, if you have one, has replaced your social security number as an identifier. Turn on your cell and it’s like Frodo putting on the magic ring. Somewhere far away a giant eye opens and it looks right at you.
Dick Tracy’s wristwatch, dreamed up by comic book visionary Chester Gould, was a two-way phone/two-way TV/two-way computer. Gould foresaw the use of wiretapping and voice recognition, among other things. For my generation, it was watching Captain Kirk flip open his communicator that made the gadget geek in all of us say, “Hey, that’s sweet! Give me one of those!”
But the Faustian joke on us all, certainly, is that we can’t beam up, Scotty, not yet.
The cell phone has morphed into an elaborate toy for young people, and a crutch for businessmen and lovers. And cell phone etiquette is worse than land-line etiquette ever was. Admit it. How many times have you been waiting in line at a retail counter or at an airport when some businessman with a fragile ego starts calling his associates with the incredibly urgent information that he is, indeed, standing in a line? Or seen a woman babbling away on a cell phone while changing lanes in fast-moving traffic with a car full of kids? I do get a kick out of watching teenagers use their cell phones. It takes me back to a time when the outside world consisted mainly of friends, in league with one another against the absurdities of the straight responsible world all around us. Now they can publish their reactions to that world from their cell phones, and that becomes yet another object lesson in social interaction and its potential consequences.
Here, I must digress and vent a little about what I call Gadget Geeks. Sadly, they are mostly men. Recently I was at the cell phone store to replace a lost unit. It was one of those infuriating stores where there are plenty of cashier stations, but management has only one person on per shift to handle customers. In front of me in line was a fellow, roughly my age, a lost unit if ever I saw one, wearing a trendy belly pack, expensive jeans, and an outdoorsman’s vest and boots. An urban mountain-man, I guess, come out of the suburban foothills and landed here in trendy upscale urban Bethesda, Maryland, with an I’ve-been-to-the-gym-four-times-a-week-physique. He was there for half an hour, and when the clerk finally screwed up the courage to ask this fellow if he wanted to buy anything, the answer was no, he was just getting caught up. I wanted to shoot them both with a high-powered super-soaker full of mountain moose piss! The Twenty-First Century will be a heaven for Gadget Geeks, I’m afraid—grown men addicted to video games, computer freaks