I’m not addicted to my phone. Not even a little. It’s common for me to go a few days (a few weeks...) without checking my phone, then seeing it and going, “Oh yeah, shit, I own one of you, don’t I?” This may seem like a lovely, life-affirming thing. “Oh, Jenny,” you may now be thinking. “You must spend all of your time prancing around daisy-covered meadows because you are not chained to technology!” Actually, reader, there are some unforeseen annoyances to being like this. Which is why I don’t think it’s petty or sadistic for me to hope that one day everyone gets brain cancer from mobile phone radiation so I can yell, “SUCK IT, BITCHES!”
Every time I go out with my phone-addict friends I spend the whole time trying to be more interesting than an iPhone. Have you ever competed with an iPhone? It’s damn hard. I’m just waiting for the moment when they look up at me and go, “That anecdote was sub-par. I’m going to YouTube now” and I’m forced to spend the next two hours twiddling my thumbs. They, too, are twiddling their thumbs, but at least when they do it they get to look at funny cat videos. It makes you paranoid, because you never know exactly what they’re doing. I’m convinced they’re sexting Ryan Gosling and telling him how lame my stories are. “Ugh Jen’s telling me another hypothetical. FML!”
I realise that, yes, I am writing this online so naturally, I’m not walking around yelling, “WHAT IS THE INTERWEBS AND WHERE HAVE ALL THE TELEGRAMS GONE?! I’M COLD AND CONFUSED!” The internet, I understand completely. This is possibly, in no small part, because it is free for me. (I live at home, my mum pays for it, get off my back.) Whereas if I want to text someone it costs me 25 FREAKING CENTS! I can blow a few dollars on one decent text conversation. Do you know how much McDonald’s I could buy with that?? No conversation is worth that. Unless I actually were to get Ryan Gosling’s number, because then I’d be selling kidneys to keep up my texting habit.
I should explain; I don’t have a smart phone, so I don’t have that free texting/IM-ing stuff. In the world of modern phones, mine is the one drooling in the corner mumbling incoherently. I got a phone much later than other people, and even then it was only because it was my mum’s old one so it was free. Score! (If you haven’t picked this up already, I’m a massive tight-arse.)All of my conversations with people about phones involve me saying things like, “Oh, your phone has an in-built flamethrower? Mine doesn’t even have Snake.” I don’t have apps, or connection to the internet. But it does all the things I need it to do, so like hell am I spending more on another one so that I can download a thing that shows me what I’d look like if I was fat. I don’t need a phone for that, just some chocolate cake and a few years for my metabolism to slow down.
Few things annoy me more than when people assume that just because I’m a teenager in 2013 that I’m tech-savvy. (Actually, there are a lot of things that annoy me more than that. This lies somewhere below being burnt alive, but just above cutting my gums when I floss.) I always hear social commenting TV personalities say things like, “Oh, you know, all kids these days have their whatsits and doodads, we don’t need to tell you anything, just look it up on the iPhone that I assume you have!” No, social commentator. Stop assuming that.
I only use my phone to text because actual calls terrify me. I am actually less intimidated by a face-to-face conversation than I am by talking on the phone. It’s as if my brain can’t comprehend the technology, and so it spends the whole time sobbing and screaming, “HOW AM I HEARING THEIR VOICE BUT THEY’RE NOT NEXT TO ME? I CAN’T SEE THEIR FACE! ARE THEY SMILING? ARE THEY MAD AT ME? I CAN’T TELL! AGHHH!” I need visual cues, and talking on the phone is bad for that. Plus, I constantly have the problem of calling people and then not being able to recognise the voice of whoever has picked up. I always end up having this conversation:
Mystery phone answerer: Hello.
Me: Hello.
My head: HOLY SHIT WHO IS THIS? DID SOMEONE ELSE PICK UP ON THEIR BEHALF OR DID I CALL THE WRONG NUMBER?
(Long pause.)
Mystery phone answerer: Yes?
Me: Uh, yeah, I was calling for Mary? Is she, uh... there?
My mind: Oh please for the love of God don’t be Mary and I just couldn’t tell, oh please...
Mystery phone answerer: Sure, I’ll just get her.
Me: (sigh of relief)
Well, that’s the best case scenario. I once called someone called Colleen and said, “Hi Jenny, it’s Colleen.” That is on par with the time someone wished me a happy birthday and I said, “You too.”
But I digress.
Maybe I was just born in the wrong century. It would also explain my hatred of people who whip out cameras and decide to gather photographic evidence of me being un-photogenic. Or at least, I like to think I’m un-photogenic, because the alternative is that bad photos of me are accurate representation of my face. And that’s just depressing. At least if I was born before technology I wouldn’t get tagged in candid photos that make me look like a stoned undersea creature. It’s a lot easier to run away from someone who’s trying to paint an oil portrait of you. By the time they’ve set up the canvas and the palette and looked up, I’m gone, and they’re left going, “Aww... Every time...”
I know we’ll eventually have to explain to kids that the save symbol is a floppy disk and that a smiley emoticon is a representation of how human faces used to show you that they were happy. Their brains may explode. Assuming that they still have brains, and they haven’t been scooped out and replaced with micro chips.
But don’t get me wrong, this is not nostalgia for an earlier time. I wasn’t alive in that time. I don’t think technology is evil, or that people are more evil than they once were. We’re the same people essentially; we just live in a slightly different world. At least this world has indoor plumbing. All I’m saying is, hey, if I’m talking to you in real life, don’t pull out your phone to text someone more interesting than me, or take a photo of me, because I will grab the nearest object and garrote you with it. Your choice.