Ubiquity in My Town (with apologies to J. Joyce)

When I recently called my cell phone service provider to renew my service plan and see what deals they had, I was surprised to learn that my tenure of 7 years with the company was considered a long time in the cell phone business. Thus, to keep my business, they decided to give me a wildly reduced data plan and a brand new free Smartphone.

I declined.

“Why”, several of my friends asked me “would you turn down a free Blackberry?” I could have said: “Been There. Done That.” But I didn’t.

Yes, in my prior job, I was a member of the Crackberry Nation, reading a book with one hand and pulling a Blackberry off the holder on my belt every time it buzzed with a new message with the other. In retrospect, I have to give a lot of credit to Nobel Laureate Ivan Petrovich Pavlov who became somewhat of a household name in the 20th Century by using a bell to cause dogs to salivate because they thought they were going to be fed through the process of conditioning.

I have to think that Pavlov is having the last laugh, thanks to Research In Motion – the creator of the ubiquitous Blackberry – Steve Jobs – the peddler of the iPhone – and the many other companies that produce the so-called SmartPhones.

Heck, for three weeks after I gave up my blackberry I found my hand moving to the spot on my belt where my Blackberry used to be. Pavlov would have been proud. He would have also been proud of the woman I sat next to at a recent seminar I attended. Her Blackberry was on silent mode and she kept it in her bag which sat at her feet. That did not stop her, though, from taking her Blackberry out of her bag and checking it every sixty to ninety seconds and then putting it back in her bag. She never responded to anyone. She just reached into her bag, took out the Blackberry, looked at it and put it back in the bag. Over and Over and Over. And Over.

I, for one, cannot understand the constant need to be connected. Before my dad retired in 1988, odds were that when you called our house, Mom would answer the phone. To dad, when the phone rang at work there was a problem. Therefore, one way to avoid problems at home was to avoid answering the phone.

I am just old enough – 49 – to remember working in a company before fax machines were prevalent. In those days, if I got an inquiry on a case I was handling, it would come via a typewritten memo dated two or eve, god forbid three days before. I would immediately prepare my typewritten response, throwing it into a blue envelope and placing it in the interoffice mail bin and then forget about it. Maybe I would get a response, maybe I satisfied all queries. But I knew that I had at least seven days before I needed to deal with the issue again.

What a relief.

David Pogue, the Technology writer for the New York Times wrote the following:

When you whip out a BlackBerry or a Treo in public, what does it say about you? You might think that it says: “I’m an important person who can’t afford to be out of touch. I can do e-mail all day long, and I’ll never miss that critical deal.” But people around you might be thinking, “Look at that huge, clunky phone,” or “Man, I’d hate to see your monthly bill,” or even, “If you whip out that infernal machine at the dinner table one more time, I’m filing for divorce.”

Nowadays, whether I am commuting in the morning or the afternoon it seems like I am the only person without a Blackberry. Maybe it’s just me but when I get home and check my personal email, I have about twenty e-mails which are disposed of in about six minutes, if that long. I don’t think I have ever had an email that was so time sensitive that I missed out on something because I did not get to my email until I got home at night. How did we exist as a nation without our Blackberries?

Marcus Aurelius wrote some 1,850 years ago: “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”

I cannot think of better words to describe the nation we have become. We no longer take the time to sit back and smell the roses. In fact, does anyone below the age of forty even use that phrase anymore? Everything today has been made to be about instant gratification and the Blackberry is one of most ubiquitous symbols that epitomize instant gratification.

When my friends asked me “Why would you turn down a free Blackberry?, ” I could only respond with “If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge as well?”

I have to thank my Mom for that answer. I think she figured out what was important in life a long time ago. In between answering phone calls.