Here comes a big what if - what if you’re stranded away from home with no phone, no smartwatch, with pay phones becoming more obsolete in most metropolitan areas? Remember when you could use a public phone book to look up a number, and change from the bottom of your purse or pocket to call that emergency contact.
I left my phone at Kona Airport on Thursday. I remembered where I left it as soon as I sat down in my seat on the plane. If I had gone back to get it I would have had to take a chance of standby for another inter island flight later or being stranded on the sister island for the night. Another reason for my insistence to get home was I was rushing to get back to an event, the opening of a new restaurant. So I sat there, reasoning that I’d made the better choice to stay on the plane, I then realized I needed the phone for my invitation to the event - it had been sent via text message. My Apple Watch hadn’t been charged the night before, so there was no alert that my phone had been left behind. Technology can be both a blessing and a curse when we rely on its conveniences - I also realized sitting there that I could only remember a few phone numbers.
Remember when all of our phone numbers were memorized or conveniently secured in alphabetical order in a cute little phone book? They are now secreted away in our phones or sitting in the proverbial ‘cloud’, which doesn’t do us any good if we don’t have a unit in which to access them.
Back to the lost phone. My sweet daughters sent me a new phone a few months ago and I’d stubbornly held on to 4 year old ‘Betsy’ because I didn’t want to learn how to use the new one.
I ran home, grabbed it and ran to the phone store before they closed, arriving 30 minutes before its closure and they were able to transfer my contacts, messages, pics, etc within minutes. It was an amazing relief but it still left me in a melancholy state of mind that the beauty of the human mind and its utilization has been reduced to trying to remember passwords and what apps we need to replace instead of contact names, phone numbers, dates and times. Last night after the completed download, it had transferred over 1000 contacts. I began to feel nostalgic. I started thinking that it might be wise to start to memorize my top 20-50 most called phone numbers in case of emergencies.
I remained calm on the flight home but I thought about the inconveniences I would have to immediately undergo when I landed - resetting passwords, re-downloading apps, etc.
Is it silly to want to print out my phone book and start sending birthday and Christmas cards by mail again? Guess I’m just feeling nostalgic, caught up in the temporary loss of, and brief space of time in which you have no way to contact someone except for what has been thankfully imbedded to memory. But now we’ve become so limited in our thinking because our technology is advanced to the point that we are ‘free’ to focus on other things, like organizing, planning and executing. How do we escape becoming a slave to technology besides living off the grid? Is it even possible now in this day and age? I would like to hear other thoughts and comments.
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