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So the coolest thing happened today. My phone died for a little while.
I do not mean that like, "Oh my phone died better grab a charger and plug it in whoops!" In fact it was plugged in and it was supposedly charging and I was driving down the highway singing along to my Spotify playlist of choice (R.E.M. "Man on the Moon" was the tune) and suddenly nothing.
First I kept driving with one hand while with the other I reached for the charger and tried re-plugging it into the phone to coax it to revitalize itself and whatnot and the screen was like, nope, no devices are connected, wouldn't you like to connect one?! and then I picked up the phone and it was so dead even though it had been plugged in for the last hour or so as I was driving around rurally rural Minnesconsin.
You know, Minnesconsin? I was in that very very northwestern part of Wisconsin right up against the state line where the trees and the landscape and the vibes and the mosquitoes all feel a bit more like Minnesota. And you get Minnesota stations on the radio, which I find sort of vaguely freaky, being east of the Mississippi but having the Man on the Radio be all "K-letter-letter-letter" which I really never thought about that much before today. Anyway, I've been hanging out in Ashland and Bayfield enjoying the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and my favorite lake, Lake Superior (it's the most Superior of all the lakes) for a few days and today I checked out the tallest waterfall in Wisconsin, Big Manitou Falls, and then I was headed to get an iced coffee and start wending my way back down into Wisconsin-Wisconsin and the closest iced coffee to be had in a southerly direction was a Caribou Coffee in Hinckley, Minnesota and I was almost there when my phone died.
One thing about me is that I have to basically be dragged kicking and screaming to get a new phone. My phone works and it has my things and why do I need a new one? has sort of been my take for the last two or three decades. But, every 3 years or so the planned obsolescence demands that I get a new one and we are at a solid 3.25 years on the current device and so I really feared that I was just really truly phone less. In rurally rural Minnesconsin. And without having yet confirmed my lodging destination for tonight.
Do you realize how much we rely on our phones?
I mean, I know you think you do. We all chuckle about it nonchalantly all the time. Ha ha ha we are all so addicted to our phones ha ha ha. But most of you flick on the GPS to drive to a freaking restaurant. You don't even have a little mini-spiral-bound Rand McNally atlas in your backpack (as I do).
OK but let's focus on what was viscerally important: I was arriving in Hinckley, Minnesota, population 1800-ish, and I knew I had another hour before the closing time of the coffee, according to what my still-alive phone had told me an hour or so earlier in the state park, and I figured I could go in to the coffee shop, plug in my phone to the wall and see if that was any better than the car charging (that was not charging), and or get out my laptop to connect to worldly things.
My phone always has issues with Android Auto. But because I don't own my own car right now (urban walkable lifestyle for the win!) I only remember this when I have a rental car, like this week. It does occur to me, occasionally at least, that updating my phone more often might alleviate this. Maybe if I had my own car I'd care. But it's always disconnecting and re-connecting, which is why it had taken me a second to grasp how really dead it was in the first place. Side if not obvious note that the oldness of my phone and charger also concerned me and so as I drove around this tiny town of Hinckley NOT in fact spotting the Caribou Coffee but spotting the True Value Hardware store, I thought, let me get a new charger and maybe solve some of this problem.
The man in the hardware store dutifully led me to his Android phone chargers, lamented with me how dependent we are on phones now, and described to me how to get to the Caribou Coffee: it's IN Tobie's Restaurant at the gas station. Ah. It's not a real Caribou Coffee. I mean, it has all the drinks and the espresso and such, so I got my iced latte, but what it doesn't have is anywhere to sit or plug in.
So, back in the car with the iced latte I try connecting the phone with the new charger and it is just not having it. It seems to recognize, with a little lightning bolt, but then nothing, No 1%, nothing. It was time for desperate moves. I drove on down the road to the McDonald's parking lot, sat there in a parking spot, pulled out my laptop, used the new charger to plug THAT in and give it a little power, made a hotel reservation a couple hours down the highway, and thought about how many road trips I went on in my late teens and early twenties with nary a smartphone in sight.
What is wrong with us? Seriously? Why can't we make plans anymore?
But beyond that, why must I use the phone for every thing?
Because now it's later and I'm in a hotel room and my phone has charged after being plugged into an outlet (it was simply NOT having the car connection, clearly) and I really do need to get a new phone but this one might just get me through a few more days as I head home and all, but I'm sitting here typing on my laptop with my phone purposefully across the room from me. And I started thinking about how very many web sites demand two-factor authentication. Both work-related and personal. I am forever entering the codes sent to my phone. What if I needed one of those earlier? What is this brave new world we have created where every other moment of our existence sends us scurrying to this stupid device that is tracking everything we do (and say!) and selling all the data to billionaires galore? How many hours could I last without using my phone, before some company demanded I access it in order to log in to their site? Let alone how work demands its use (without offering anyone company cell phones - I mean just to log in to fckng Microsoft or Salesforce or whatever).
For me, text messaging is the biggest thing I miss if I don't have my phone or it's charging in another room; it's what I check most often throughout the day. So I mean, that's a decent reason to use a device frequently - in contact with actual human beings one actually knows.
But it really annoys me that banking and credit cards and email programs and work profiles and Outlook and several other daily task things send me to my phone before I can use them on a laptop.
I really really want to do some kind of a 72-hours-without-phone challenge. I seriously don't know if it's possible at this point in the way my daily life is constructed - and workplace apps and two-factor authentication are the biggest parts of that.
How long do you think you could go without touching your phone?
