Terror Cell
Rob’s plaint yesterday over at emphasisadded was right in my wheelhouse. My mother, who has been visiting for the last two weeks, has been speculating about whether she needs/ought to have a cell phone. While an individual contract didn’t really pencil out for her, I concluded that adding her to my family plan did. With just two days to work with before she flew home, I got on craigslist and found a sweet phone for sale from someone living close by. I bought it, activated it and drove home in triumph.
Then, I encountered the scenario Rob decribes: apprehending the technology from my 77-year-old mother’s eyes, and not as a bauble in the hands of her techo-geek son. As I attempted to reduce all of the arcane features of this fairly middle-of-the-road, no-camera phone into a humble answer-call, place-call instruction set, I found myself distinctly flummoxed. I had about an hour Tuesday night, and another hour Wednesday morning before her plane left, and we went through all the basic moves.
I’m confident she’ll eventually get the hang of it. A lot of her friends carry them, and perhaps she can turn Thursday’s bridge club into a cell phone clinic. She routinely cleans up at the bridge table, something I could never hope to do since I can’t remember the cards in my own hand, let alone everyone else’s, so the cell phone puzzle should eventually get resolved. Then she’ll move on from the merely technical to the moral and philosophical implications of cell phone use - whether to use it while driving, whether to answer it in a public restroom, how to glare in disgust at the person next to you when it rings in a quiet theater.
Still, you wish that some things in modern life would be satisfied with elegant simplicity. I despair as I watch my mother-in-law, who has some cognitive issues, try to juggle the remotes for our TV and the cable box. She only has about 3 channels she likes to watch, but it’s almost certain that at some point in an evening I’ll walk in and the screen will be full of snowy fuzz because she’s done something out of sequence with one of the remotes.
