Listomania! - 10 Ways in which the Cell Phone has Changed my Life
I haven’t done a “Listomania!” in a long time, but I was thinking recently (always a dangerous thing) about how cell phones have changed how I live and thought I’d put a list together. I actually remember my family having a “party line” when I was growing up where we had four different people sharing the same phone line. Before you dialed (rotary, of course), you had to check for a dial tone as one of the other families could be using the phone and you’d have to wait until they got off the line before you could call someone. (You could also very carefully listen in on their conversations as well.) We finally got a “private line” when I was nearing our teen years, but my family didn’t get a push button phone until after they moved to town and I had already left home.
My first “cell phone” was the size of a piece of firewood and if you had baggy pants, you could stuff it awkwardly in your back pocket, but then you’d walk funny. It was around 60 cents a minute to use it on top of that, so you had to be very careful or you’d have a phone bill the size of a car payment.
Now, of course, my children have grown up in a world where they don’t know of a world without cell phones and my blackberry/storm gets my email, updates my Facebook account, allows me to Twitter while waiting at traffic lights, can surf the net and has applications I will never, ever use. It’s just a different world since the arrival of the cell phone.
So here’s my list of 10 ways in which the cell phone has changed my life….
1. I have been known to call my kids on their cells from my recliner rather than to walk upstairs to talk to them about something.
2. I frequently suffer from “false vibration” syndrome where I sense that my phone has vibrated indicating a call or incoming text/email only to find that it was nothing.
3. I generally check my phone for messages (text/voice/email) before I get out of bed in the mornings.
4. I use my cell phone as as my alarm clock.
5. I have texted my kids at the dinner table to tell them to quit texting at the dinner table.
6. I have left roaring messages on my kid’s cell phones about the fact that I pay for their cell phones and yet they still didn’t pick it up when I called knowing full well that my kids never listen to their voice messages anyway and simply check for missed calls.
7. I don’t remember the last time I used our land-line at home to make or receive a call. If it wasn’t part of our cable bundle, I’d get rid of it.
8. I have a panic attack whenever I drive through a part of the country where there isn’t Verizon service.
9. I once got caught playing BrickBreaker during a staff meeting — and I was leading it.
10. My children and occasionally their friends sometimes send me heckling texts while I am speaking at large meetings and I repeat an illustration they’ve heard before or I make a grammatical error.
I actually could do about 20 more of these, but I’ll stop here and let you add yours. How has the generation of Cell Phones changed YOUR life? Share in the comments section below.
