How did we live without cell phones?

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised anyone to learn that the number of cell phone subscribers in Maine has now surpassed the number of people using old-fashioned, land-based lines.

What is surprising, though, is the remarkable speed at which this transformation in communication occurred. Before the late 1990s, a Verizon spokesman recently told The Associated Press, the growth of land-line phones was as steady as it had been for decades. In just the past few years, however, the number of cell phone subscribers has jumped to nearly 520,000 in Maine, which means that half the population of the state is now equipped to reach out and touch someone whenever they’re overcome by the desperate urge to gab.

The mobile-phone explosion, and the way the little chatterboxes have irrevocably altered the nature of public conversation and the bounds of privacy, prompted one University of Southern Maine communications professor to remark, “I just wonder what we did before the cell.”

That is, indeed, a question for our age, and one frequently posed by people who have encountered cell phone users in the most unlikely – and unwelcome – places. A deer hunter of my acquaintance shook his head in disbelief as he told me about the first time he heard a cell phone ringing in the woods, followed by a cheery “Hello” from a nearby hunter who put his gun down and answered the call as casually as if he were in his kitchen at home.

“What in the world did people do before cell phones came along?” asked my hunter friend, who seemed unnerved by the thought of a telephone going off in the middle of the woods on a frosty November morning in Maine.

I’ve asked the same question often in the past few years, with increasing perplexity and frustration, as cell phones have infiltrated every aspect of life and wireless technology has grown faster than the social rules that govern it. I ask it whenever I see a car speed past me doing 80 on the highway, while the distracted driver has one hand on the wheel and the other pressed to his ear. I ask it when I’m unlucky enough to be seated next to a cell phone yakker in a restaurant, and have to endure one side of a loud and prolonged conversation about everything that’s going on in the woman’s unhappy love life.

What did people do before cell phones? I asked that question just the other day in a bookstore, as the guy next to me whipped out his phone and proceeded to read aloud several pages of a book to his girlfriend. I ask it when I hear the musical phone ringers chirping in a movie theater, when I’m visiting New York and every other passenger on the train seems to be shouting on phones in a different language, when I see people wandering the aisles of the supermarket with phones to their ears, yammering about the price of this and the calorie count of that. Remember when we simply bought the items on our shopping lists and shut up about it?

I ask the question, too, whenever my son’s cell phone rings every two minutes while we’re trying to have a conversation, and when the teenager at the gym blabs incessantly on the phone while pedaling the exercise bike beside me. And I’m afraid I’ll be asking it 30,000 feet in the sky within a couple of years, which is when the wireless companies are expected to finish developing software that will allow cell phone use on airplanes.

So what did people do before cell phones? The same old things they do now, of course, except without telling every stranger within earshot about it.