Now that I have waxed prolix on the joy of phone, I confess that I have grown to hate the bloody things. I think it's an unbearable impertinence that anyone in the world can cause a bell in my livingroom to ring. Loudly. And I'm expected to hop to it like Pavlov's receptionist every time it does. Screw that. Who owns whom?

Dialling out, even worse. Before making a call, I mentally compose a message that is as thorough and concise as possible and practice it under my breath. The result, naturally, is that I am a gibbering moron the moment someone answers. (I rehearse for the Burger King drive-up, too, but that's another story). I sometimes write down my own name and phone number before making a call, lest I forget this complex, tricky data under pressure. It has happened.

I am, in short, the last person on earth who would volunteer to wear a telephone on her person.

Lost weasel

My early experiences of cell-phonery didn't help much, either. My folks were the first people I knew that had one. I want to say this was in the late eighties, but googling around has made me think that might be a touch early. Let's say 1990, then.

They drove a pair of matching black Lincoln Continentals. No, ours is not a family of tacky gangsta wannabes, these were ex-fleet cars from my dad's company they got for cheap. The phone was integrated into the car in an invisible, cyborgian way that I never worked out. I think maybe the whole car was a cellphone, and you were supposed to flick on the dome light and talk into the parking brake. Mystery to me.

In fact, I got away without answering a call once by pleading helpless ignorance. After that first time, though, I had the basic answer process carefully demonstrated for me. But I wasn't convinced I ever hung up properly, so I was afraid to curse out loud — something I needed badly to do.

See, I'd go home for a visit, and my stepmother would send me out on a little errand. I fancy myself a good driver, but I go in for two-seater convertibles. Piloting her Lincoln was like trying to drive a junior high school gymnasium.

Then I'd get lost. Sure, I grew up in the general area, but that was a long time before, on the other side of town. I have a naturally appalling sense of direction in the best of circumstances, and I hate getting lost.

Then the automobile starts to ring.

Okay. I'm struggling to master the car, I'm lost, the inviso-phone is ringing, and now it gets really scary: that's my stepmother on the line. Before I finish the first errand, she's calling to send me out on another one. And my stepmother is, as a matter of the strictest fact, a psycho. If any of my family ever reads this, of course I mean "psycho" in the nicest possible sense of the word, and you know I'm telling the truth.

If she sends you out to buy ten-inch white dinner candles and all you can find are eight-inch white dinner candles she knows that's not right because she was in that store a week ago and they had p l e n t y of ten-inch candles and they couldn't have sold them all in one week, so why are you sitting there telling her you can't find them. W h y ?

Maybe she's not saying that very last bit out loud, but trust me, the why? is implicit. Now, every errand is just that much farther from home. I swear, if the last stop had been a tidy little cottage made entirely of gingerbread and spun sugar, deep in the wild woods, I would not have been one bit surprised.

Lime-o-phones

I was amazed, when I went to England in the late middle (or early late) '90s, how much more commonplace cellphones were than in the States. Excuse me: MOE-byle phones. They were years ahead of us, less in the actual technology than in taking the technology to their hearts. I'd never seen so many people in the street raving and gesticulating at nothing, like a nation of paranoid schizophrenics arguing with their imaginary voices.

Certainly one factor was cost: mobile phone service was, until recently, very expensive in the US (there's a back-story there, and I'm not interested enough to find out what it is). It's more than that, though, and I don't know what. We're only now starting to use instant messaging in any general way. Another mystery.

Weasel reconciled

In the end, one too many traffic jams, one too many evenings I decided to take a detour on the way home, one too many "what was the name of that...?" questions while I was out shopping, and I broke down and got one. It came in handy on occasion, it was a lifesaver a couple of times when my car coughed and died. But I never really warmed to the thing.

Until last weekend.

I went hiking last Sunday. It was the first nice-ish day after a long, miserable Winter, and I was itchy and restless. I decided to have a good long walk in the woods. There was one particular landmark Big Pile of Rocks in a nearby state park I decided to head for, so I downloaded written directions into my Palm, and the map coordinates into my GPS, and headed out.

Beautiful walk. Found the spot straight away, about a half a mile inside some gentle woods along an easy trail (I think I saw a weasel!). I decided to come back a different way, off the trail, but I hadn't downloaded topographical maps of the area. There was unlikely to be anything serious that-a-way, but it's been wet and I didn't fancy have to ford anything. "No problem," I thought, "I'll phone Uncle B and get him to look it up on the Web."

It hit me. Holy shit. I'm way back in the woods, all by myself. With my handheld computer. My satellite tracking device. My call-from-anywhere phone. About to dial a number three thousand miles away (3,301.60 miles away, according to my thingummy). To get somebody to jack into the net and do reconnaisance for me. It's here at last! The future finally got here.

I'm sure all my precious technology will look laughably dated in a year or two. I'm sure you young whippersnappers have no idea what the big deal is. But anyone who can say the word "whippersnappers" without (much) irony will know just why this brought a tear to my eye.

 

Dear me, I love the 21st Century

 

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