I remember coming home one day as a teenager to a deafening roar inside the house. Puzzled, I walked into the kitchen to find my mother, basically nonplussed by the noise. I looked at her quizzically.
“Your father has a new toy,” she said.
For some reason, Dad decided we needed surround sound for our television. Mind you, this was the mid-1980s so the technology was fairly primitive. Dad didn’t care and felt he needed to turn the sound all the way up to make the proper adjustments to the system.
Part of me found his ideas pretty kooky, but I have learned over the past 30 years or so that he had the exact right idea when it came to gadgets. You can never have enough of them.
Even with this mindset, I have resisted the siren song of one particularly fun item – a fancy cell phone. Well, that is until a few weeks ago.
I finally upgraded from my pre-paid, no-frills phone to a low-cost monthly plan which includes a touch-screen phone. I didn’t go for the full-on smartphone, but I have enough fun things to play with now.
That’s the problem.
Before, I could only really waste time with the Tetris game on my phone. I had easy access to the game for entertainment while waiting for someone or sitting at a red light. I would never play while driving, just while sitting motionless during my sometimes interminable commute. I put up some killer scores on that thing, one minute at a time.
A whole new world has opened up for me now. I can check Facebook. I can go on Twitter. I can even surf the Web with my unlimited data plan. And by unlimited I mean as much as I want as long as I have a good cell signal.
I used to make fun of those people who stared down at their phone, typing away furiously in any situation. Now I fear I may become one of those people. I couldn’t imagine how insane I would be if I had a really fancy phone.
As the youngest in a family of eight, I have a pathological fear of missing out on all the fun. I assume everything good either ends just before I arrive or starts a couple of minutes after I leave. I don’t cause the lull in the action. It just happens that way. I should have probably sought out some therapy for this at some point, don’t you think?
Anyway, this fear now manifests itself in my participation in social networks. I love how these tools have allowed me to keep in touch with people or find out if the latest funny thought in my head entertains others. But now I can try that stuff whenever I want. Or whenever I’m I an area which doesn’t have a lot of trees. Naturally, this has the potential to get out of hand.
I do understand that I can’t constantly check the thing while driving, but it’s the rest of the day that I worry about. People I know may be having fun without me. I need to keep tabs on them so I can get there before the fun ends.
Don’t worry, 90% of people feel like they always miss everything. The other 10% always miss all the fun too but they have a knack for storytelling that it seems every moment of their life is fun. I met a guy the other day who was such a good storyteller that he could make digging fence post holes seem like the most fun thing ever. Trust me, he made some pretty boring things seem like a blast.