Don't Call Me, I'll Call You

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with technology. In the main I'm a communicator, so things like email and text messaging and facebook all seem like a good idea at first. I get all gung-ho about them, I join up a bunch of crap, I learn to text like a bloody ninja (thanks for the practice, Feather Neice) and I am all, "LOOK OUT, world, because I am CONNECTED."

And then my email inbox starts to fill with notices that people I do not know have commented on my comment to a person I only barely know anyway but who I originally friended out of some very thin thread of commonality. Then the phone beeps incessantly with texts, including ones from my DH, who has a strange fascination with texting me updates about his bowel movements... while he's actually sitting in said location. (Confession: I think it was actually me who started that disturbing trend.) And then I start an email conversation with someone, and we're all "OMG! You think so too?" and "LOL" and "ROFLMAO" and a whole bunch of other acryonyms, until we reach the slightly awkward part of emailing. The part where the conversation itself has come to a natural end, but there's this whole "I have to reply to the reply" thing... and I, for one, find myself hiding from my emails. As I sit under the desk and hope they will forget they ever entered into a conversation with me, I find myself wondering what the original conversation thread was about in the first place.

Anyway. All that was a long way of saying that I have, as of this weekend, been without a mobile phone for about 4 weeks. Now to be fair, in LA I did have the use of a mobile phone but I mostly used it to call my Mom, and I didn't advertise the number so nobody really knew they could call me. As a result I often turned it on after several days of forgetting about it only to realise I had 18 missed calls from my Mom, my sister, and my niece. BUT. I have been without my personal mobile for 4 weeks. This is actually monumental, since my personal phone also acts as my business phone. The bloody thing rings no less than about 10 times a day, and it's not unusual for me to pick it up at 8 pm on Sunday to hear about someone wanting a cake quote.

Don't misunderstand me. From a business POV, I wish it never stopped ringing. From a personal POV, every minute without my electronic leash has been a god send. Seriously, you never know how much you hate something until it's finally gone and you find yourself breathing an enormous sigh of relief.

I have also learned quite quickly who my real friends are. They are the ones who not only actually HAVE my home phone number, but they've USED it. Amazing, right? Who knew I only had one friend? (Okay, kidding. I have 2.)

The freedom I have from my phone is just... brilliant. You have no idea how much free time I have now that I am not texting, I am not listening to voice mails, and I am not looking at the damn thing repeatedly to check if I missed a call (because secretly, I think it's possessed or something and when people call me it does not ring- just to fake me out.) I've also noticed that my neck is no longer at 30 degrees since I now actually look up once in a while instead of down at a itty-bitty screen. If all that is not reason enough, I've also realised what thumbs feel like when they are not numb from pressing too many letters to get that stupid predictive text thing to do what I want and say what I mean.

As of this week, I need to take the phone back (poor NN is about to have her own epiphany when she gives it back, I think she is well and truly over phones in general). I'm not looking forward to it. I don't WANT my phone back. I want to stay in blissful peace, away from the noise and the chaos and the always-here-no-matter-what nature of a mobile phone. It's entirely possible that I feel this way because at the moment, I just crave quiet and solitude.

It's also entirely possible that I feel this way because I've seen an iPhone. And I don't want my crappy Nokia back, I want a phone which can be a Magic 8 ball and tell me the weather, too.