Cell phone tyranny annoying

OK, here’s the scenario: It’s a couple of years in the future. France, realizing that crimes against humanity are on the increase, has brought back the use of the guillotine. Among the major crimes punishable by the blade are: the phone use of call waiting and especially the rude use of cell phones.

The use of the guillotine was of course discontinued some time ago – but not so long ago as you may think. It was fast and efficient and furnished popular entertainment – except for those who were the stars of the show.

The only reason it was discontinued is that some medical spoil-sport was able to prove that the brain lives on for about another 30 seconds after the head has been severed from the body. Big deal. You didn’t hear Marie Antoinette complaining.

So here’s my premise then: After careful consideration, I would have to say that two of the most annoying inventions ever devised by man are: the guillotine … and the cell phone.

Oh sure, cell phones have a legitimate and valuable use. Here’s just two examples: If I was driving from Bangor to Portland to pick up a friend at the airport (he doesn’t like flying in the smaller plane he would have to take to Bangor) in the dead of winter and the dead of night, I might want to have a cell phone with me. If I had a teenager daughter going out on a first date with a new boyfriend, I might want her to have a cell phone … just in case.

But the reality is that a great deal of cell phone use is totally unnecessary and very annoying. Walk across the University of Maine campus at Orono. You would think that a third of the student body had something wrong with one of their ears, since they’re holding their left or right hand up against it – and ignoring the rest of the world.

Or you’re driving down the highway, and the guy in front of you is trying to hold the wheel with one hand – while yelling over his cell phone in the other hand.

Or you’re at a movie, and the person behind you is discussing the movie over his cell phone with another person, maybe in the theater or maybe at home.

Or how often in a restaurant have you been an unwilling listener to the cell phone conversation at the next table – invariably done at top volume?

Or this concrete example: I work at Searsport District High School on Maine’s midcoast. Recently, 30 of our students went down to our sister school in Brooklyn, N.Y., for four days. The intention had been to get to know their partners at the school and their host families. But the biggest complaint when they came back was: “They never got off their cell phones!” (Our students were asked not to use their cell phones while they were with their partners or talking to their host family.)

Currently, one of the biggest issues in the school is when and how students can use their cell phones (As near as I can tell virtually every student has one.) The current policy is they can use them before and after school, but they have to be turned off in class.

My contention then is this: Cell phones are potentially a wonderful device for communication, but in reality they seem to be a barrier to real one-on-one communication. In trying to talk to someone, how often have you been thwarted because they are on their cell phone, or “I have to take this call”?

Poet and writer John Donne once said: “No man is an island.” He would have to rethink that today. Cell phones seem to be making islands of isolation of all of us. The computer, the Internet and the cell phone seem to compose 80 percent of the world of many people.

And as for text messaging. Speak-ing as a journalist, don’t even get me started on that.

Someone might ask at this point: “Oh yeah, wise guy, do you have a cell phone?”

The answer is: no. But it is true that all of my letters in recent years have been done via e-mail, another “wonderful” invention.

France is one of my favorite countries, and I have visited there many times. I only wish I could have visited when the guillotine was still in use. That way, if I committed a capital crime, I could be sent to the chopper, and in my last 30 seconds when my head was lying in the basket, I could perhaps have sung one of my favorite songs:

“I … ain’t got no body.”

Stephen Allen is a “retired” journalist who lives in Searsport and who works five days a week as the AmeriCorps VISTA coordinator at Searsport District High School.