Techno-Crack

I’m sick, and probably tired, too, because those two things so often go hand in hand. I just came into my room at home carrying not one, not two, but three phones. That would be my BlackBerry cell phone, my wife’s cell phone, and the portable home phone. God forbid that I should miss a call. I am sick; and tired.

When did it happen – when did we become such important people that we have the need for instant and continuous communication? Many of us easily remember having one phone at home. It wasn’t portable and it didn’t have an answering machine. If we weren’t home, the person trying to reach us simply had to try again later. No big deal. Life went on. If we were on the phone, the person trying to reach us got a “busy signal”. What was wrong with that? Nothing was wrong with that.

Until we became VIPs, each and every one of us.

First, we all got an answering machine, in analog format. That wouldn’t do, because it would only store about five minutes worth of messages. We needed a machine that would store 316 messages, each of which might be five minutes long. And we needed a message box for each person in the family. Who can tolerate commingled messages? No one can. Along came the digital answering machine; and we were saved.

But, we’re no longer satisfied with an answering machine. Our messages can’t wait that long; each of them is too important to wait. We’re too important to wait. We now rely on voice mail on our cell phones and voice mail at the office. I’m so important that I have my office voice mail forwarded to my cell phone voice mail. Not only am I important, but all the people I work with are important, too; almost as important as me. A crisis in my job, if left unattended for a few hours, could alter the axis of the earth.

We can’t go anywhere without our cell phones? Exhibit A – my boss’ executive assistant takes hers with her into the bathroom, in case an axis-altering call comes in for the CEO. We can’t keep anyone waiting any longer – which brings me to “call waiting”. We won’t even allow ourselves the luxury of finishing one call before moving on to another. After all, the person calling next might be more important than the person on the line now. We wouldn’t want to miss the important people. Heaven knows we don’t want them to miss us.

I use the blessed BlackBerry; it’s not just my cell phone, it’s my personal digital assistant, which is a pretty pretentious description if you say it slowly. This electric umbilical cord is referred to on the streets as a CrackBerry because it’s a friggin’ addiction. It brings me all my work and personal email, my pages, my text messages, my walkie-talkie calls, my internet access and, of course, my old-fashioned phone calls. I’m an all-star on the BlackBerry. I can bang out four-page responses at the rate of 40 words a minute on that thing, typing with only my thumbs. It keeps me current; up-to-the-minute as they say. Hell, I’m not just up-to-the-minute, I’m ahead of myself. I’m ahead of everyone. I’m ahead of my time – which, of course, makes me a legend in my own time!

But the techno-crack to which we’re addicted goes far beyond the simple little cell phones and PDAs. We have to have a still camera, a video camera, and a GPS unit in those things. If we don’t, then that’s an indication that we’re not very important, because very important people need to know where they are every second and be prepared to film whatever they see whenever they are where they are.

We have a digital video recorder at home. It’s 92% full. We have 46 recorded must-see TV shows, or parts thereof, waiting for us to watch whenever we get a little three-day opening in our schedules.

My wife has 7,468,319 digital photos stored on her home PC (I, of course, have my own home PC). I have 3.76 terabytes of email stored on my office PC. Those are only slight exaggerations.

My wife and I each have an iPod, on which we’ve stored enough music to allow us to listen to our 107,000 most favorite tunes while traveling non-stop around the world with Steve Fossett.

By the way, if you Google “iPod”, you get 480,000,000 hits in 0.19 seconds. Hopefully, when Microsoft releases their new Vista operating system, we’ll get that information a little faster.

At this point, I could list electronic gadget after electronic gadget; programmed appliance after programmed appliance; entertainment device after entertainment device; high-tech thingamabob after high-tech thingamabob. But I won’t. I’m an important person, and two of my three phones are ringing.

We’re all sick; and I have to believe that we’re all tired, too. In fact, I’m going to bed. Thank God my side of the bed is separately programmed from my wife’s side of the bed, so whenever we’re both sick and tired we can individually choose from 83 different bed contours. We’re even important when we sleep.