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"Facebook message me," was the most common phrase I used last week. Living without a phone was like being sent back to junior high — if I wanted to reach my parents I had to use a pay phone or one of my friends' cell phones to call home.
Of course you're probably wondering why a college student would willingly give up his phone for week. Well, I didn't give it up, at least not voluntarily. I just misplaced it when I was out with friends. It's a horrible feeling. Although it seemed difficult to survive at first, the inability to find my phone wasn't the end of the world. It gave me a new outlook on the role of phones in contemporary society.
Since they became commercially available in 1983, owning a cell phone has become a given over time. Twenty years later, it seemed like everyone had some sort of phone. Today there are third-graders who have cell phones.
But stopping anything cold-turkey, like using a cell phone, can have weird effects on a person.
The first few days were the roughest because I had suddenly lost the constant communication I had with a lot of my friends and family. For a while, it was like walking into a room where you don't know anyone and you had no one with whom you could talk.
Although I eventually learned the magic of messaging my friends on Facebook and emailing my parents, it still wasn't the same. I wasn't getting an instantaneous answer from them.
During the next few days, I started hearing my phone go off and felt phantom vibrations where I used keep it. Oddly enough, although I knew I didn't have a phone, I still searched for it every time a sensation like that came over me.
By the middle of the week I started using my iPod as my phone. I honestly thought I'd solved my problem of living without a phone; I could simply talk to my friends through Facebook on my way to class.
That failed for two reasons.
1.) The Wi-Fi around campus is horrible, especially if you're nowhere near a building.
2.) The application on my iPod stopped pulling up Facebook after using it only three times.
On the last day of that miserable week, my mom emailed me to call her at work. The task soon became a headache. I had to find a pay phone and learn how to use it. Luckily, I found out that there are still pay phones on campus (they are in the backside of the Union by Wells Fargo). Once found, I had to figure out how to use them. I had to put a dollar in quarters into the slot, dial the area code with a one in front of it and dial the number hoping that, after figuring out that process, I would hear a familiar voice on the other end of the line.
The task of using a pay phone was inconvenient, and it made me miss my cell phone even more. Why was I mourning the loss of an inanimate object that had no feeling and no life unless it was plugged in for at least four hours? It is a form of communication we all can use. A phone is convenient enough that we can talk or text a person without the hassle of learning UNL's Wi-Fi hotspots or the in's and out's of pay phones.
However, some of the problems I encountered last week seemed frivolous by the time I got a new phone.
Our society is hooked on phones, as they cater to our communicative demands. We want tasks done immediately and not a week from today. Although not having a phone did slow down communication I had with my friends, I ended up getting a lot of things done. If I had to concentrate on homework or studying I simply had to log off of Facebook until I got the job done.
It was sort of a gift from God that I ended up misplacing my phone, but now, having a phone just feels weird. There's now a bulge in my pocket the size of a deck of cards, friends are talking to me constantly and learning how to work this new phone is almost as bad as learning how to use a pay phone. However, it's that theme of convenience in our society that keeps pushing me to learn how to re-use a cell phone again.
brandonperchal@dailynebraskan.com
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