An Abduction Revelation

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW!  Someone shouted as I was walking through a shopping mall. “Yes, I can hear you…loud and clear,” I replied.

The person must had thought I was deaf because he walked a few feet further and shouted again, CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW! I then realized he wasn’t talking to me. Maybe he was trying to get in touch with God, because he was holding a strange small black gadget to his ear and talking to no one in sight.

That was my first encounter with the cell phone. When I finally realized what he was doing, I had a eerie feeling right then that cell phones and I were not going to have a pleasant relationship. Almost overnight it seemed an awful lot of people were walking around shouting CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW.

Rude people are now on the phone everywhere I go, with no concern of those around them. There is always someone disturbing my peace while dining at a restaurant, or in the middle of my golf swing,  or at an exciting moment during a movie. Perhaps the most irritating of all is having to listen to the dude in a public restroom announce to his caller he has diarrhea. I don’t need to know that shit. Most cell phone users seem to have no clue that those around them might not want to hear their conversations. If you mention this to them, they look at you as if you are some kind of a alien and have no right to privacy.

Cell phone addiction has become more addictive than drugs, tobacco, and alcohol combined. Some teenagers will knock off their parents if they should even think about taking their phone away as a punishment. Before you know it, little Johnny will be demanding a phone as soon as he learns to talk.

These small communication devices have caused big communication problems. Face to face conversations are about as dead as a doornail. Driving has become bumper car road rage.

People of the world have become slaves to these smart electronic gadgets. They are compelled to answer every call as if it were an emergency, or play every one of those silly games, or take that once in a lifetime photo. What’s a old fart like me to do? I don’t have nor want one of those bothersome smart gadgets. My dumb flip phone works just fine in cases of an emergency.

Should I submit and join those addicted? I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to hold out. My family and friends insist that I join in their addicted slave world. They become irritated when they get the recorder on my landline. I say what has worked for me in the past, will work for me in the future. That could put me in the Guinness World Book of Records  or at the very least, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not candidate.

To find out if you are addicted try setting it aside for a few hours. Do your hands get sweaty and itchy? Do you become nervous and antsy? Then you are having “cell phone separation anxiety.”

Excerpt from my first book, ‘The Comeback Kid, Memoirs of Thomas L. Hay’.  There are lots of interesting stories like this one. Available on Amazon: http://www.amzn.to/1bWV44N