Cellphones Are The New Cigarettes Housecoat Diaries One of the fundamentals of the housecoated world is a dedicated resistance to dropping everything just because the telephone rings. Why does that little ringtone gain precedence over whatever else is happening at the time? I think there should be a code programmed into the phone system that triggers random calls to people that say, “Just chill out, dude, nothing’s happening. It’s all good. Go back to what you were doing.” Actually, one of my favorite things to do is to call someone up and just say, “Okay, I’ll talk to you later.” I am not a fan of phones. I find them to be irritating and only an occasionally justifiable necessity, not unlike stop signs on country roads and warning labels on cigarettes. In fact, as long as I’m mentioning smokes, I believe that cellphones are the new cigarette: hot little cancer-causing friends for your fingers and your lips, something to feel important and sexy with when you’re all alone. The telephone, arguably the greatest Canadian invention of all time next to Tim Horton’s, was a good idea to begin. But much like Timmy Ho’s, it got weird somewhere along the way. When there was just a few of them around, you felt like you were onto something special. Now you’re just perpetually being told by a robotic voice that you’re important so shut up and wait your turn. I like talking to people “live and in person,” as they say, and I’m exceptionally reminded of that whenever I have to deal with a call centre helpline. It always seems that I’m on hold during so much of the conversation that I may as well be talking to myself anyway. Or worse, how about when some telemarketer calls you and immediately asks YOU to hold? Or when they say, “Hi, John!” in their attempt to make you believe it’s a friend calling? It’s that ironic sense of aloneness that the phone so often brings that make me truly happy when I do answer the damn thing and it really is an old friend calling from Tucson, Arizona or Black Diamond, Alberta to tell me that they’re coming out for a visit. The reason I like those kinds of calls is because they mean I’m going to have a genuine interaction in the near future. Real face-to-face contact between people is progressively disappearing in North American culture, and the main culprit for that are phones, especially cellphones. Once the technology improves just a little bit more, and you can see people as you talk to them, we might just lose touch (no pun intended) with other people altogether. It’s a bloody old lonesome world so I guess it’s no surprise that people lurch for their phones every time they ring. But if nobody ever did it, what would happen? Would everything fall apart? Or would people have to get out of their cars and their houses and come back downtown and hang around and have fun together like they used to? Or maybe I'm just a crotchety old hermit with a head full of yesterdays. I’ll talk to you later.