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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour father has a new toy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t care and felt he needed to turn the sound all the way up to make the proper adjustments to the system.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Even with this mindset, I have resisted the siren song of one particularly fun item \u2013 a fancy cell phone. Well, that is until a few weeks ago.<\/p>\n
I finally upgraded from my pre-paid, no-frills phone to a low-cost monthly plan which includes a touch-screen phone. I didn\u2019t go for the full-on smartphone, but I have enough fun things to play with now.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t imagine how insane I would be if I had a really fancy phone.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019t you think?<\/p>\n
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\u2019m I an area which doesn\u2019t have a lot of trees. Naturally, this has the potential to get out of hand.<\/p>\n
I do understand that I can\u2019t constantly check the thing while driving, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. \u201cYour father has a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","wpcat-3-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1333"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1335,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions\/1335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}