Cell Phone Users: Are You People Crazy?

Despite being a techie, I avoided owning or even using a mobile phone (except maybe once or twice when someone handed me theirs) until last year. It was a combination of not liking them, and not needing them.

For one thing, I hate talking to people on phones in general. My shaky geeky social skills require visual feedback to give me a better idea of how I'm doing with people. I also do better when I can communicate non-verbally, such as showing that I'm listening and understand what they're saying rather than trying to communicate that with verbal grunts.

Also, the idea of being accessible to other people all the time was not that attractive. I like to get away from people sometimes. And I never felt any need to call people from wherever I happened to be. "So, uh, where are you? Whatcha doin'?" Spare me. Anything I might want to call someone about can wait until I get home. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but "call me when you get there" seems like a perfectly sensible sentence to me.

Ironically, it was when I became unemployed - staying at home even more than I'd like, and not having extra funds to spend on luxuries - that I finally gave in and got a mobile. The issue was that my biweekly appointment for calling the Unemployment Office's automated check-in system was in the middle of one of my classes (one of the few time periods actually blocked in on my weekly schedule). With no pay phone handy enough for the few minutes I'd have during the mid-class break - public pay phones being a casualty of the spread of mobiles - I figured I'd need to bring my own.

So I got a cheap phone with pre-paid service, the cheapest option available, especially for someone who's not going to use the thing much. And over the course of the school term, I successfully reported in and got all my checks. But, gods, the sound quality on that thing was horrible! Even standing by an open window on the 7th floor of the building. There were times the system didn't even recognise my button-pushes.

Now in my new job, I'm expected to carry a mobile phone with me everywhere during working hours, especially in the evenings when I'm the only tech on duty, and people need to be able to contact me even when I'm out fixing stuff. The college outfitted me with a fancy PDA-plus-phone-plus-web-browser gadget. And you know what? The sound quality is horrible. I often can't make out what the other people are saying, and they can't understand me very well. And if they're on a mobile phone too... it's sometimes impossible to communicate. And you people are embracing this?!

With wireless technology it's like telephony has taken a huge step backward into the early 20th century again. Maybe it shouldn't surprise me so much, what with all those "can you hear me now?" adverts on TV. But I thought those were just jokes about gaps in coverage. I assumed that if so many people were using these things, not just when they had to, but all the time... if people are even discontinuing their "land lines" in favor of all-wireless service... that the service had to be better than this! Decades of gradual improvement in the nation's telephonic infrastructure had gotten us to the point of that "hear a pin drop" advert a couple decades ago. And you people have just thrown that all away. I don't get it.