One good cell phone deed deserves another

You can see some pretty bizarre things regarding America’s hopeless addiction to cellular telephones, but the tableau that unfolded in front of me on a busy downtown street in a neighboring community one recent fine day was surely one for the books.

As I watched from an adjacent parking lot, a 20-something female pedestrian, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, jabbered away on a cell phone as she crossed the street without first having looked both ways to make sure there wasn’t a runaway beer truck bearing down upon her.

Not to worry, though. Law-abiding motorists – two to the right of the lady, one to her left – dutifully came to a stop to allow her free passage. A more routine transaction between pedestrian and motorist could not be imagined. And yet, something seemed wrong with this picture – something I couldn’t quite put a finger on until I had donned my Highly Trained Observer hat and concentrated on bringing the picture into focus. Then it hit me: Not only did the pedestrian have a cell phone glued to her ear, but so did each of the three motorists waiting for the lady to cross the street.

Four people, four cell phones, four multi-taskers simultaneously conducting four pieces of business, that, truth be known, likely didn’t amount to a tinker’s damn. And me sitting there in the parking lot wondering how these people ever made it through the day before the cell phone and its more-sophisticated technological cousins arrived to dominate every waking hour of their talkative lives.

The experience was not unlike walking across most any college campus at any time of day or night, in any season, and seeing nearly every student glide by on automatic pilot while seemingly engaged in intense conversation with themselves.

You can say “Hi” to this crowd until the cows come home and elicit little but a glassy-eyed stare as they babble into their cell phones, so far removed from your world they might as well be in Tibet.

As a card-carrying Luddite who doesn’t own a cell phone and, with any luck, never will, I am baffled by the strange habits the constantly developing communications technology induces in the legions of automatons held slave to its bells and whistles.

Still, I can see where the addiction might have its advantages. Being able to call for the nearest St. Bernard dog with a rum cask attached to its collar should I become mired in a snowbank in the Alton Bog on a cold winter’s night springs to mind as one potential benefit. On the other hand, the very good chance of morphing into one of those exhibitionist cell phone geeks who feels compelled to call his wife from the crowded supermarket deli department to loudly ask permission to bring home a pound of coleslaw would seem to be a significant minus.

Until a year ago, my telephone had been a boxy old rotary-dial model that had been bolted to the kitchen wall since Prohibition days. The clunker had its advantages, including its usefulness in flummoxing political pollsters and telemarketing hustlers by not having any buttons to push when they would order me to do so. That was always great fun, and it was a bit of a trauma to lose that phone to progress.

And now I see by the morning paper that in about a year and a half I stand to lose another antiquated security blanket. According to a news story by Mal Leary of the Capitol News Service, unless I mortgage the back 40 to buy one of those grotesquely over-priced digital television lashups, or buy a converter kit for considerably less money, my battered television with its flimsy rabbit-ears antenna will be rendered useless when the digital television age officially arrives and the existing analog service becomes history in February 2009. Woe is me.

Here in the northland, the choice of over-the-air television channels runs the gamut from A to C. One of the three channels available emanates from a foreign country and another one is the local public broadcasting outlet that can be a bit of a yawner at times. Talk about your Hobson’s choice. In Potato Land, would-be couch potatoes without cable or satellite dish can find television pickings to be pretty slim.

Still, to anyone not accustomed to a heavy television diet from the cradle onward, three available television channels can often be three channels too many, whether the picture is delivered in analog, digital or digital’s inevitable successor. Should our undigitalized television screens go blank come February 2009 it just might be a blessing in disguise.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.