Keep in touch...

So last night I had dinner with my friend Fashion Slave. For those of you who don't know her, she is the greatest quality-control-production-person a fashion designer has ever employed (and I'm not just saying that because she sometimes lets me borrow her clothes). Anyway, we were to meet at this restaurant on the West side and somehow, in an act of unprecedented stupidity, I let my cellphone battery die. So there I am, walking the streets of Manhattan, without the slightest idea where I'm going, and I have no way to call her. So, I did what I had to do in the time of such a crisis....I used a pay phone, no judgments please. I can still feel the germs leaping on to me as I picked up the receiver, not really expecting it to work. I mean truthfully, when was the last time you used a pay phone? I kind of thought those steel monoliths were just left as a tribute to simpler times, before the need to be constantly "connected" rendered them obsolete.

Remember when you could leave your house, run your errands and return home to check your machine without being overridden with anxiety about missing a call? Remember when computers were used to type term papers and email was checked with the same frequency as the smoke detector? Remember when there were such things as "time off" and "vacations," and being unavailable was actually a reasonable state of being. The real mystery here is why in the hell we pretend we need all of this connectivity. Most of us don't even answer the damn thing, we just use it to screen folks out. And why would you want to pay hundreds of dollars to have a device that essentially never lets you leave the office? Guess what, if I don't want to talk to you during work hours, I sure as hell don't want to talk to you on the weekend.

Now I'm not trying to scorn technology, and rest assured my cell phone is right beside me, but wouldn't it be nice if you could still leave your house and be by yourself, instead plagued by some passive-aggressive need to know who's calling you so you can not answer?

And I would like to stand behind my beliefs and I would say I'm leaving my cell at home on my next outing, but since I'm pretty sure I have some sort of ear fungus from last night's pay phone encounter, I guess I'll keep recharging.