My cell phone just dinged in the silence of the morning.
I instinctively picked it up to see what message, text, phone call or email I just received.
It was nothing important — or was it?
The ding was an alert saying my weekly cell phone usage report had just been summarized for the week.
It seems that I have been on my phone just a tad over 24 hours during the last week.
I thought about that for a minute. I spent one whole day on my phone this week. That comes out to about three hours and some change each day.
That is too much. I like my phone. It is convenient. It keeps me connected to family and friends far and wide.
Honestly, some of those connections I could do without. Some tell me about all the drama in their relationships. Others share every single funny cat video that has ever been recorded. Some tell me what they had for dinner and when they went to the bathroom. Some celebrate Dawg victories and others are armchair quarterbacks for Coach Kirby Smart. And more than I can count are on self-appointed crusades to convert me to their faith or to their political party. Depending on the persuasion, the country is either going to end November 5 or be the best its ever been. And, of course, all of them are right and you are wrong. But, that’s another column. Besides, before long, my cell phone will tell me who is right, whether I want to know or not.
But, as I said, by and large, my phone is a useful tool.
I can remember the day when the phone was attached to the wall in the kitchen or squatted on the table named for it in our living room.
We used it sparingly and heaven knows you didn’t even use it to call Baxley or Blackshear because it was long-distance and it would cost too much.
You didn’t take it in the car with you. You didn’t take pictures with it. It didn’t ding, vibrate or play a Top 40 country or rock hit either. It jangled or clanged like a bell.
Nowadays, we don’t give any of that a second thought. Cell phones make the world much smaller and easier to navigate.
I use it day in and day out in my work.
Just last week, I went traipsing out to the Cason community near Rehobeth Church and not only did my phone know how to get me there, it also gave me the latitude and longitude, the approximate distance, the turn offs and nearby landmarks. It also told me it was sunny and 83 degrees in the Cason settlement Friday afternoon.
I even took a few photos with my phone there. Otherwise, I can look up words in the dictionary and learn their definitions and how to spell them. I can send a text or an email. I can pull up the calculator and do math. I need that feature bigly because I don’t know how to math. I have a theory about what makes it hard. It’s right there in the statement: Math problems. You have to solve them. They give me a headache.
Maybe staring at my phone for 24 hours does, too, but it’s a lot more interesting and it is not a problem.
If I want to, I can check the weather, listen to a favorite song, pull up a photo of the lovely Sara Evans and stare at it and myriad other things.
And, believe it or not, I can even make telephone calls with my telephone.
Who knew? I love my cell phone but it is very high tech. I’m very low tech, like Mayberry meets Star Trek.
I probably only know how to do about 20 percent of the things my phone actually has the capability to do.
Sometimes, I actually use my cell phone to go on the internet to find out how to use my cell phone. So essentially, my cell phone is showing me how to use my cell phone.
Maybe, just maybe, that explains the whole 24 hours I spent on my cell phone last week.
