Here’s my cell phone number: 615-497-5933.
No, don’t bother dialing. I cancelled my Sprint service last week and don’t plan to renew. I could transfer the number to another service, but my wife and I have decided to see how long we can go without owning cell phones at all. It’s sort of an experiment, our little version of “Man vs. Wild.” Can two middle-class softies survive in the rough and tumble environment of the 1990s? Stay tuned!
We didn’t set out to conduct an experiment; we set out to cut expenses. I signed up for a high-minutes plan a couple of years ago, when I was renting a small office with no land-line service. I actually used my minutes back then. But I work at home now, and my cell phone sits on my desk for days, gathering dust.
My wife’s cell phone can usually be found in the kitchen, sharing a plastic bowl with some broken pencils, keys that don’t actually open anything, and kids’ scissors that don’t actually cut anything. I’ve tried calling her cell phone maybe a dozen times in the past six months, usually to inquire where she is, and all I’ve ever learned is that she’s not in the kitchen.
So when I paid my Sprint bill last week, I finally wondered why I’m spending upwards of $120 per month for phones we almost never use. My wife looked into low-minutes plans and pay-as-you-go plans, but with pretty much all of them, we’d probably end up buying minutes that will go unused and eventually expire. I’ve already paid Sprint for thousands of minutes I never used, and I’d prefer to stop spending money for the privilege of receiving a monthly bill asking for more money.
As I prepared to float the idea of just going without, I was somewhat hesitant — as if I were about to suggest we strip naked and take a walk around the block. But then to my surprise, my wife floated the idea first. (Going without cell phones, not the naked thing.)
It occurred to me that I’m married to perhaps the last adult woman left in America who isn’t convinced the only thing standing between her and a tragic death on some unnamed road is a cell phone. When cell phones first became affordable, that was the excuse offered by every female in my extended family for buying one: “I won’t really use it very much, but if something happens when I’m on the road …”
As someone born in 1958, I never understood the sudden fear of traveling phoneless. Nobody I knew even owned a cell phone until around 1995, and even before then, road fatalities that could’ve been prevented by a timely call were extremely rare. But once cell phones hit the market, everyone suddenly experienced a shared childhood memory of hushed conversations between their parents:
“Hey, what’s going on over at the Smith house?”
“Shhh! Didn’t you hear? They stalled on Interstate 40 and were eaten by wolverines while waiting to be rescued.”
“Geez … if only there was some way they could’ve called somebody.”
I didn’t buy a cell phone until my second year in Los Angeles. They were still a bit of a novelty then and not exactly cheap, so the advertisers were in “create the need” mode. I recall a radio commercial in which a harried businessman is stuck in traffic but saves the day by taking an important client’s call — get this — in his car!
I wasn’t a harried businessman and didn’t want a phone attached to my belt, but soon after I signed with an agent, he sold me on the idea. His exact pitch was: “Where the @#$% have you been! I had a @#$%ing audition lined up for you! I will not represent you if I can’t @#$%ing reach you when I @#$%ing need to reach you!
So I bought a cell phone, and I’ve had mixed feelings about them ever since. Sure, they’re convenient, but I dislike them for a number of reasons. Here’s one of the biggest: people can reach you when you’re not home. Before cell phones, I’d sometimes leave my apartment specifically to avoid talking to anyone. Friends, employers, creditors, and family member could always catch up with me later:
“Where were you?!”
“I was out.”
“Uh … oh.”
Nice and simple. Nobody’s feelings got hurt. It’s not quite the same days:
“Where were you?!”
“I was out.”
“Well, why didn’t you take your cell phone?!”
“Because I was afraid you might call.”
“Uh … oh.”
I don’t like it when people expect me to be reachable anytime, anywhere. Even when I consciously intend to be reachable, my subconscious desires take over. I’ll leave the house and forget my cell phone. I’ll shut off the phone at a movie theater, then forget to switch it on for a week. I’ve never owned a Blackberry, and if I have my way, I never will.
Another reason I don’t like cell phones: people can reach you when you’re home. When I was growing up, most families had one phone — usually bolted to a wall in the kitchen. If you were sleeping upstairs, you stood a fighting chance of missing a call. But with a cell phone, you can accidentally leave it within earshot — your wife’s, if not yours. A few months ago, my wife shook me awake at some ungodly hour:
“Honey … HONEY!”
“Wha … what?”
“Your cell phone is ringing downstairs! Can’t you hear that?”
“No. That’s why I left it downstairs.”
“Are you going to answer it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to talk to anybody right now.”
“Well, what if it’s an emergency?”
“Sweetheart, I’m not a surgeon, and I’m not carrying the nuclear launch codes. In all of human history, there’s never been a single emergency where somebody yelled, ‘Oh my god! Somebody get a comedian on the phone, now!’”
But the biggest reason I dislike cell phones, by far, is this: other people own them too. According to my analysis, at least 60 percent of all modern phone conversations are boring, pointless, moronic or embarrassing — although the talker who should be embarrassed rarely is. Yes, there were boring, pointless, moronic, embarrassing phone conversations before cell phones, but
- There weren’t as many, because calling outside your own city was expensive.
- You could only engage in a boring, pointless, moronic, embarrassing phone conversation in a relatively private place … your home, your hotel room, the nearest phone booth, etc.
Now you can have a boring, pointless, moronic, embarrassing conversation in a restaurant, on a train, at a ball game, on a park bench, in the grocery store, in a movie theater, or on an airplane the very second it touches down. Millions of people do — usually two feet away from me, and usually while talking to someone who is apparently hearing impaired. The more common cell phones have become, the more people seem to be talking on the phone simply because they can … or because it’s less mentally taxing than staring off into space. So while trying to read a book in an airport, I get to listen to deep conversations such as:
“Hi. Nothing, what’re you doing? Cool. Yeah? No, I missed that one. Huh? Oh, it’s like nine o’ clock here. Yeah. Are you going to work soon? Cool. What color shoes are you wearing? Yeah, those are nice. Huh? I can’t understand you; are you eating breakfast? Yeah? No, I can’t; they’re bad for my hemorrhoids.”
So rather than buy a product a part of me wishes hadn’t been invented in the first place, I’ll try to go without. We’ll see how long that lasts.
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