Cell Phones - Why They Suck - Pt. 1

I am old enough to remember a time before cell phones.

I recall walking outside into an idyllic spring day in order to trek from house to house in my neighborhood, searching for friends. Knocking on doors and having them answered by parents, asking politely, "Is Tony home?" and then listening to them yell for their son, who would bound down the stairs and we would chat at the door until finally he'd either come outside, I would be invited inside, or I would move on to the next house in search of something to do.
I remember my mother giving me a few coins so I could call her from a payphone if the movie got out early. I remember making plans days ahead of time and committing friends' numbers to memory. I recall listening to the radio in the car and never having to turn down my favorite song because someone was trying to make a phone call.
I remember seeing movies without the omnipresent glow of a cell phone screen or the sudden blaring of monophonic Motzart three rows up.

Yes, cell phones have made the world a worse place. When a friend and I used to hang out, I would never have to pause in the middle of a story so they could shoot a text or chat for fifteen minutes about something that people would never dream of actually committing time and effort to. ("Ohmigod, wait, what? He did what? With balsamic dressing, ohmygod, how could he order that salad with balsamic...")
I seriously believe that half the reason we've gotten so hung up on trivial things in this day and age is because of instant communication.

It used to be that you would see something stupid ("a man ordering a salad with balsamic dressing, ohmygod...") and you would think to yourself: Holy hell, I totally have to tell my friend about that later!
Then later would come and guess what, you couldn't even remember what you were going to tell them about. But that's ok, because in truth it was so stupid and trivial that God actually cried a bit to think he had some part in the creation of an entity which might find such a thing worth talking about.
Now, though, you can instantly text, call, e-mail, videotape, photograph, and otherwise document every inane triviality you encounter and spread it with an almost religious fervency right from your phone!

Now the internet is awash in ridiculously pointless pictures and videos of people and animals doing ridiculously pointless things that a lot of people will watch and quote and relate to friends who have also seen them and also think they are justtoofunnyholycrap and the whole thing will turn into a massive cultural phenomena that will be related on every closing-segment news program two days after it stopped being new, funny novel, or even tolerable and then Family Guy will do something on it and it will start all over again and seven thousand videos will show up on youtube claiming to be responses to it but are really just people singing an acoustic version or lipsynching in front of a web cam in a poorly lit room and yet people will watch them because if there is anything Americans hate more than foreign films it is anything even remotely approaching originality.

And all because some smart marketing sonovabitch looked at a cell phone and thought to himself, "Slap a camera on that thing, we'll make billions."
Every other day I hear a story about someone somewhere getting into some kind of trouble because of a cell phone. A thirteen year old charged with possession of child pornography because his girlfriend sent him a naked photo of herself. A tram car crashing because the conductor was texting. The list goes on.

And the worst part is how quickly people have begun to see cell phones not as a nifty device, but as a seriously necessary part of their life. I have watched a girl burst into tears when I turned her cell phone off and refused to give it back to her.
Get over it!
It's a phone! It's not your grandmother's goddamned dialysis machine!

I suppose the purpose of this rant is just to vent my frustration over the seeming over reliance on technology that is gripping us like one of those malevolent vines in The Ruins. Whenever I hear someone bitching about their lack of cell service or that Facebook won't load, or that the air conditioning isn't strong enough my first reaction is to punch them hard and tell them, "There, now you have something better to bitch about!"

But I don't. Because I know someone would probably end up filming it and putting it on YouTube, at which point I would become part of the problem.

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(Now, as you can see from the title of this post, this is just Part 1. I honestly have no idea how many parts there will be in this series, or what they will focus on, but I can gurantee at least one more.)