I was at a bluegrass concert a couple of weeks ago in a very high end concert hall in Fort Worth. The hall, designed for full symphony orchestra, is nearly acoustically perfect by many estimates. A bluegrass fan, I’d been there to see Ricky Skaggs and his band Kentucky Thunder a few years earlier. At one point in the evening, after a break, he’d come back on stage by himself, walked to the microphone, and announced that he was going to try an experiment. Much to the concern of the sound and light people, he waked to the very end of the proscenium, out of reach of microphone and nearly in darkness, and began to slowly sing the bluegrass gospel song “Talk About Suffering” a ca pella. Skagg’s rich voice flowed effortlessly to every seam and fold of that building, and by the end of the song, you could quite literally have heard a pin drop. It is an experience I won’t soon forget.
This night, Del McCoury and his fine band attempted the same thing. All four singers in the band strode forward and began a rendition of “Sinner Man”, an equally haunting a ca pella song. A few bars into the song the first cell phone went off. Then another. Then two at once. Many heads turned to the offending sounds, myself included, and what amazed me more than anything else is that the people receiving the calls actually answered them and began speaking in low tones.
I grew up on a farm in rural Illinois in the 60s. That’s 1960s, incase you’re wondering if I go back to the War of Northern Aggression or not. Still, just 40 years ago or so, technologically speaking, it may as well have been 1860. We had a single phone in our house, hard wired into the wall. It was so un-portable that it wasn’t even plugged into a receptacle that would allow you to move it from room to room. It was hard wired. It had a crank. Yes, a crank. No buttons, not even a dial. I’ll never forget: our number was two longs and one short. If you wanted to call us on this little local farm town circuit, you turned the crank all the way around twice, waiting for the crank to unwind twice, slowly, then did three half cranks. Our phone would ring, and, if someone were home, in the house, not in the shower or basement, they’d answer the phone. I’m pretty sure it was a good 15 years before we had any kind of answering machine. If no one answered the phone, no one was home to take the call. And that was simply accepted. “Oh, the Pensons aren’t home.” You would think and try again later. Or, “They must be out in the garden.”
Eventually, phones became modular, then remote (wireless, but still tied to a base receiver in your house), then sort-of-portable (remember those “car phones” that were welded to the car’s console?). Then a phone they lovingly called “The brick” which looked like its namesake, weighed about as much, yet allowed you to talk to the three other people with a wireless phone in your state, as long as they weren’t indoors and were somewhere near one of the two existing signal towers in the country. Now, these days, it’s pretty rare to find a 3rd grader who’s not checking in with his mom on his cell phone as he walks home from school. And this is good, right? I mean we have instant, global, uninterrupted access to our loved ones, friends, business associates, relatives, whoever. But that’s the problem…
Along with all of this comes the expectation; No, the obligation, to be 24/7, dead-of-the-night, in the bathroom, at church, in traffic, always available. In fact, if you don’t answer, you are somehow breaking this unspoken commitment to everyone around you. I teach music in my home, and have a pretty firm policy of turning my phone off during lessons. I don’t have a land line, just a cell, so I can effectively “turn off” phone contact completely for that one hour lesson. After the student leaves, however, I find myself almost running to my phone to turn it back on, check missed calls, voice mail, messages, anything, just to make sure that one of my children hasn’t been abducted, my mother hasn’t died, a comet hasn’t struck the earth, markets haven’t failed, or any other calamity hasn’t befallen me or a loved one. Sometimes I’ll get testy messages left by friends admonishing me for turning my phone off as if it is an open act of disrespect aimed at anyone who should seek to contact me; sort of the equivalent to being home, closing the blinds, and not answering the door. You know what? Sometimes I don’t feel like answering the freaking thing, OK?
Part of the problem is the cell phone itself. I just recently learned this from a History Channel show: Cell phones operate by sending and receiving two simultaneous but different frequency radio signals, one for incoming and one for outgoing. This doesn’t always work perfectly, hence the awkward “both talk at the same time five times in a row” thing that seems to happen on cells. As cell phones get smaller, they get a lot easier to carry around but infinitely harder to use. If you’re my age, you probably need a couple of pairs of reading glasses stacked on your nose to be able to see who’s calling or even dial a number. Talking into it is kind of like talking into your daughter’s toy Barbie phone. And even the best cell reception still carries the sound quality of a radio dispatch from the front, which is not very conducive to conducting a nice, relaxed conversation.
All parents see cell phones as a sort of life line to their kids. We all run these disaster scenarios through our heads in which our children have been abducted and are being held for ransom in some dingy prison and that single cell phone call alerts the police and saves their lives. I don’t know about you, but the last phone call I got from my kid was a wrong number; she meant to call her friend and peremptorily hung up on me.
I drive a very old pickup truck and feel somewhat comforted by having the cell with me in case of a breakdown. I went through this scenario in my head, though, one day while driving down a lonesome back road and couldn’t for the life of me figure out who I’d call if I did break down. I’m not a member of AAA. I guess I’d have to call a friend and ask them to Google auto towing on the web and give me a number to call. But this is kind of a false sense of security, anyway. If you break down somewhere, chances are the first three cars that stop to help you are going to have cell phones with them anyway, so you may as well have left yours home. And how long is it going to be before in car navigation systems like Garmin take over the role of onboard telephony?
If you call me tonight at 11:30 to tell me your niece got selected to study in France for six weeks, “and isn’t it exciting?”, I’m almost certainly not going to answer the phone. Pretend like I’m “not home at the moment”, but what I really am is “I don’t want to talk to you right now. Your desire to talk to me does not automatically trigger a similar, mirrored response from me. This does not mean you are any less precious to me. It means that I’m probably watching a Laker’s game while playing Spider Solitaire, and darn it, I’ve got voice mail, so please use it, and the first opportunity I get to trump up some interest in your daughter’s education, I promise I’ll call you back tomorrow.”
Pet Phone Peeves:
1) Voice mail saying simply “Call me.” You see, your wanting to talk to me does not mean that I share this desire. I am not responsible for initiating communication simply because you got my voice mail.
2) Text message saying simply “Call me”. This is the best way in the world to get me to call and leave a voice mail saying “Text me.”
3) Refusal to use voice mail, hanging up, redialing the number of times it takes to make me finally succumb and answer. This is the best way in the world to get me to turn my phone off and piss you off when you go straight to my voice mail.
4) Calling and asking me “Hey, what are you doing?” I’m probably going to answer by saying “I’m currently trying to surgically bisect my own Vas Deferens glands”, or more directly, “I’m wondering why the hell you called me.”
5) Calling after 10 pm. I’m a musician, and I do stay up late, but I was raised in that sort of sensible Midwestern way that says that Aunt Bertha better be damn near dead if you’re calling me after 10. She’ll still be dead in the morning, and there’s not a damn thing I can or will do about it tonight.
6) Setting your ring tone to your favorite song. NO ONE CARES! EVERYONE IS ANNOYED! Ok? No one is thinking “My! He must be a rather interesting young fellow to have chosen such a probing, well-crafted song for his ring tone! I think I’ll strike up a friendship with him!”
7) Using your phone in the car. If you can’t bring yourself to use your turn signal or rear view mirror because of the phone propped against your head, it’s time to question your priorities.
I know cell phones are here to stay. My hope is eventually they will merge with the computer completely, and my hand held computer can handle my calls.
Later.
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