Hey There, Stranger: Us and the Machines

My cell phone is five years old this summer, and succumbing to senility. I resisted having it until my aunt bought it for me my senior year, and my sense of thrift won out over my entrenched backwardness. It was for safety reasons, the fam chorused. Leave it off if you like. But when I left it off, or forgot it somewhere, I payed double for the silence with a fiery torrent of familial hysteria: Where were you?! Why don't you answer our calls?! You could have been killed! So I started keeping it around. It became an accomplice to romance. I got used to it.

I can't say I saw it coming. Last Christmas I arrived home to find that my mother had developed an ingrown cell phone: the keypad and her thumbs were fixed together. If I wanted to have a conversation with her, I had to covertly turn it off or hide it so the infernal chime would not interrupt. My sister had it, too. It was like talking to someone with a severe video game addiction. I lost my temper a few times, and found myself parroting any parent of a fourteen-year-old social butterfly. Sometimes I lost my cool and simply slapped the damned machine out of their hands.

My own phone predates texting. The last classes in my History of the English Language course this spring were on the effect of texting on English. Previously unresponsive students sprang out of their zombie-like stupor to expound excitedly upon this revolution. Debates occurred on the finer points of the movement. I looked around at these spirited, rosy-cheeked prognosticators, and then down at my bag, wherein lay my tiny, bullet-shaped phone ("From back when smaller was cool," snickers my sister) which, like a DOS computer, has one passably-executed function. And I knew. The revolution had passed me by, and my obstinate stinginess kept me pinned in 2004.

Now my grandparents text, and my aunts and uncles; my little cousins pound away with their nubby half-grown thumbs. My mother's entire relationship with a beefy Polish firefighter a few towns over has occured via text (what's the point of having a beefy firefighter boyfriend when you only text, I wonder?). That chime sounds everywhere, like a doorbell signalling more and more people trying to get inside, demanding a hearing. I don't want to listen. My phone is crapping out and burns my ear when I talk longer than fifteen minutes. Plus I'm paranoid and suspicious of technological miracles and therefore afraid of brain cancer. I don't have a purse to put it in and I don't want to irradiate my ovaries by keeping it in my pocket. So I don't carry it much anymore.

The other day, I went on a hunting expedition to a field which I mistakenly thought my grandpa leased. I drove about two hundred yards into the surprisingly lush, verdant grass, and then lost traction. The vehicle drifted across the mud for a moment, and stopped. Permanently. I spun the wheels to no avail. It was then I noticed the colossol fountain of irrigation water. Ahhh... And the voice of grandma came to me: "Just take your phone along to be safe. You never know what might happen."

You never know what might happen. I got out, surveyed the deserted field under a sweltering sun, mosquitoes already fixing themselves to my limbs, and squished through the marsh to a little clapboard house up the hill. A lady was sitting outside with a young boy, reading. I introduced myself and asked to use a phone. She gave me her cell. Then she pulled up a chair for me in the shade, poured me some ice water, and we talked. She had been a technician at the Toyota plant nearby, but was laid off two years ago, so she and her husband picked up and traveled the country, working here and there. One day they got tired. They wanted to go home. Toyota hired her back on in production, mostly a welding job. I told her about Denver; she told me about growing up in Detroit; we commiserated over the lack of work. She offered to help me find something at Toyota, and gave me her contact information. I was extremely touched by this.

Later my grandpa arrived and pulled me out. Back at the house, my grandma crowed triumphantly and no one believed me when I said I was glad I hadn't brought the phone.

I am social mainly in the sense in which one might say, "The human is a social animal, banding together for food and shelter." I'm not always very good at connecting to my fellow human. I might even be reclusive. I don't think of myself as a composite of the people who see my picture online or "text" me. This is the very reason why I leave the cell phone. I need to be surprised, forced to be resourceful, and compelled to trust. I have to forgo the easy way out, the speed dial that gets me who I need and cushions me from unlooked-for interaction. And despite all the inconvenience, I like people, real ones, and not their fine-tuned technological masks. I like strangers who offer me a glass of water, a seat in the shade, and an hour of conversation.