Minuet in G? It's For Me.

First published May 6, 2005

In my opinion, the two greatest inventions of all time are cell phones and those little plastic dealies on the end of shoe laces (those of you who think I should promote things like penicillin or nuclear power onto this list have obviously never tried to lace up a kid’s hockey skate with those little plastic dealies missing).

It’s hard to estimate the impact cell phones have had on our culture. Why, there are people alive today who have no idea what it would be like to sit through a movie without hearing a high school girl a couple of rows back bellowing, “Of course I love you, Bobby. No, moron, I said, ‘I LOVE YOU!’”

Well, I love my cell phone even more than she loves that moron Bobby, and I don’t go anywhere without it. I can’t imagine not having the ability to instantly say to my friends and family, “You’re breaking up. What? HELLO?”

My love affair with mobile communication goes clear back to the 1980s, when I carried my portable “bag” phone around in a thing that looked like a vinyl trombone case with an antenna. I took boastful pleasure in calling my wireless-challenged friends from the golf course and saying things like, “Guess where I’m calling fro… hold on, my battery pack just tipped over the golf cart.”

The 2005-model cell phone I’m packing now is about the size of a matchbook, but it contains technology considerably more advanced than the space shuttle. It has a built-in clock and calendar, so I’ll always know how late I am in minutes, hours, days or months. I can send text messages with it, replacing the drudgery of a 30-second conversation with half an hour on the keypad. It even has a camera in it, with a really sensitive trigger, so I’ll be able to reminisce for years over my gallery of candid snap shots of car keys and pocket change.

My phone came with more than fifty cool ring tones, enabling me to annoy a moderate-sized crowd with the 1812 Overture rendered by what sounds like an orchestra of kazoo-playing midgets.

The neatest feature is something called “voice-activation.” I simply say what I want and the phone does something that more-or-less rhymes. For instance, if I say, “Call home,” I get the Vatican.

Of course there are down sides. It’s rare these days to see anyone driving a car who isn’t holding a cell phone to their ear, and even rarer to see someone who’s been in a fender-bender who doesn’t have a cell phone stuck up their nose.

But I admit that I have mixed feelings about the new, supposedly safer hands-free technology. I find it kind of unnerving when a guy I’ve never seen before walks up to me with some sort of blinking cyborg contraption jammed in his ear, looks me in the eye and says, “Ok sweetheart, you pick up the kids, and I’ll be by to get you at seven-thirty.”

Believe it or not, there are still some people who aren’t completely comfortable around all this advanced communication technology. This morning my wife called me on her cell phone;

“Hi,” she shrieked. How do I get this thing off ‘Speaker Phone?’”

“See the little button with a picture of a “Speaker” on it?”

“Yes.”

“Push that.”

I love being a techie.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball