Here's what else I was thinking - but didn't say to Billie --because it would have sounded too glib, too preachy: In my life arrangements are made via land phones or the Internet and appointments and promises are kept. In a worse case scenario, someone around me usually has a cell phone that I can use. Even that occurs most rarely. If friends are late, they're late. No one on my speed-dial is genetically unreliable. If one of us suddenly can't make it, they call the meeting point and get the other on the store phone. All businesses have them.

Here's what else I thought about later and which gave rise to this blog: If you're not in a business where, for too many unfortunates, privacy is a distant memory and instant access mandatory; if you're not always waiting for your agent to call about an audition; if you're not a physician or psychologist on-call; and if you're not someone whose adult life has been given over to your social network of friends and new wannabes and their connectedness needs and requirements, then instant access, outgoing or incoming, is just not a high priority. Presumably, if you're over 30, your friends do not need constant reassurance of your relationship with them. With them, even absence does not throw that confidence into doubt.

But, principle has limits. I didn't say this to Billie Dawn, my possible, future boss, but I'm saying this here. To you. Just between the two of us, and I may deny it if you tell anyone. I would offer this concession to instant access whilst at a convention: I will use a pre-purchased phone card to go with my no-frills cell phone, trotted out just for such occasions or actual emergencies. When the crisis or long road trip is over, or the convention is over, my cell phone goes back into its resting place to await the next Bat-signal moment.

Part of this occasionally awkward dance that I'm doing with this cell phone rant concerns an annoyance with telecoms like AT&T, Verizon, and other big companies who got out of the business of public phones, literally forcing people into purchasing cell phones as it's almost impossible to find public phones, even the ones now serviced by local or regional businesses and found in supermarkets and airports. Forced choices in academic testing is okay, but not in phone service.

Another part of my resistance - again, beside the fact that I now reside in a small college town and don't really need a cell phone - is the relentless propaganda for cell phone use that is omnipresent in all advertising venues, which insist, among other things, that caring parents provide every member of the family with a cell phone, under a dizzying variety of plans, and for which phone companies seem guaranteed to make an absolute monthly minimum of $100 per account, whereas before, with landline phones, phone bills ranged from 10-30 dollars for basic or general use.

A minimum of $100! (plus, hidden costs and contractual obligations with penalties equivalent to sacrificing your virgin mother). That's a huge profit surge and people come to think, as parents do when they watch a McDonald's commercial, that loving parents provide children these products or services. Talk about mind control!  Talk about agenda-setting!

This indoctrination really infuriates because it's another instance of teaching us that love is best expressed in buying products or services. And I'm not even getting into the push to make phones fashion statements so you switch them with periodic regularity as you might your annualized out-of-fashion frock - Ka-ching, ka-ching, for phone companies and brain uploads of ideas of disposability as a patriotic mind set and faux freedom for citizen-consumers.

Further, cell phones are agonizingly oversold as a service for staying in touch in the event of all sorts of minor and major emergencies. This, even though, as Katrina (and maybe Gustav) and 9/11 have shown, cell phone reliability is technologically well behind its hype. Cell phone signal-carrying infrastructure is very fragile and wafer thin in many regions. Major urban crises overwhelm cell phone capacities to deliver connectivity in widespread disasters. Moreover, there are so many areas that are dead or drop zones (I live in one), that cell phones really work best in population-dense, quotidian settings and circumstances or during small crises, personal crises -- so long as your in the right zone with the right carrier. This is, overall, not to say that cell phones cannot be very convenient. It's just that there is a lemming effect going on and I hate going off commercial cliffs if I don't need to simply because my conspecifics are happy to do so.

Cell phones are devices which people didn't realize they needed until they had one. An odd reason to buy one, i.e. it might be useful. More likely it's bought as a toy, a novelty, an idea, something one's social or business peers push on you which, in so doing, validates their decision to buy one, like married friends urging marriage on their single friends, "try it, you'll like it."(see the musical or video or listen to the cast album of the show, Company, for a Sondheimianly trenchant take on marriage and married friends)

Words like "I never realized how much I needed this phone," are really self-deceptions if for no other reason then that for most of your life you didn't need it, i.e. for most people cell phones fill a need which didn't exist. And for others for whom the need did exist, viz., those who really needed to be always reachable, the need expanded like girth on a silverback gorilla and so did all the anxieties about missing any communiqués, from the phone or from email or text messaging venues. Rational Emotive Therapy pioneer, Albert Ellis, talked about catastrophizing small events into mountains of dire disaster fantasies. People truly fret if their network of friends and contacts can't reach them immediately or if they can't call a friend right now!, while standing in line at the check out counter at Trader Joe's, and tell them their latest passing thought about broccoli, or about a possible need to change plans...for lunch...next week!

But truth is, the issue is not cell phones; it's connectivity and connectedness needs. That's the underlying mixed blessing here - connectedness and the oh too human condition! More on this angle next time.

Oh, and, in case you're interested, I'll be meeting with Billie Dawn and her university posse in a few weeks. Seems my cell phone inadequacies didn't disqualify me from being good in...media psychology.

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Tags: adult life, apa convention, appointments, au bon pain, audition, cell phone, cell phones, connectivity, conventions, dawn, dear readers, distant memory, first bite, incredulity, instant access, media psychology, meeting point, paraphrase, promises, speed dial, which gave rise, worse case scenario