My phone finally arrives in the mail. It’s small. Ugly. It’s “dumb.” And it looks like it was invented during the Herbert Hoover administration.
This phone is incapable of performing any task greater than making phone calls or serving as a doorstop. Hopefully, this will help cure my smartphone addiction.
I leave the house to run errands. Armed with the most advanced technology 1989 had to offer. I am meeting a friend for lunch.
With no GPS, I soon realize that I’m completely lost downtown. I have NO idea where I’m going once I exit familiar neighborhoods.
No problem. This is embarrassing, yes, but I pull over to ask directions.
I tell the gas station clerk I am looking for Broadway Street and ask how to get there. The clerk tells me he doesn’t know the names of any streets inasmuch as he usually just uses his phone.
So we look up directions together on his phone GPS. At some point the clerk stares at me and says, “Don’t you have a phone?”
“Not a smart one,” I say.
“Dude,” he says, and there is real sympathy in his voice.
I arrive at the restaurant late where a waitress tells me I can find a menu by scanning a QR code.
“May I have a paper menu?” I ask.
The waitress gives a bewildered look as though I have just broken wind in an elevator. You don’t even want to know how she reacts when I pay with cash.
Next, I have an appointment at the opthamologist. I arrive early. The waiting room is empty, the staff is killing time by playing on phones.
“You’re in luck,” the young staffer says. “We had two cancellations, so we can bump your appointment up 30 minutes, you won’t have to wait.”
Then she pauses. The words seem to come out of her mouth in slow motion, Darth Vader style. “All you have to do is check-in on your phone.”
“I don’t have a smartphone,” I explain. Then I place my dinosaur phone on the counter as Exhibit A.
I can tell by the look on her face she is about to deliver bad news.
“Sorry, sir. You have to check in on your phone.”
We both just look at Exhibit A again. The phone lies there like a dead slug.
“Does anyone have a phone I could use?” I ask.
“We’re not allowed to do that, sir.”
“Could you just tell the doctor I’m here early?”
Both young staffers exchange very grim looks. The woman shakes her head as though she is about to tell me one of my loved ones has been in an auto accident. “Sorry, sir, an appointment check-in has to be entered in our system before being rescheduled.”
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “You’re saying that there’s an empty waiting room, with no patients, and the doctor is willing to see me early, but because I have no phone, there’s nothing we can do?”
Shrug.
Soon, I am alone in a quiet waiting room, reading a Woman’s World magazine that is warped and faded with age. The pages contain articles written around the time I was in fourth grade, as well as the remains of a spider who appears to have died of old age. And I’m wondering how long I will be able to make it in modern society without a smartphone.
I get lost twice on the way home.
Sean Dietrich is a humorist and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His column appears weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S. He has authored 18 books and makes appearances on the Grand Ole Opry.
