On Sunday, I left my phone in the sports centre studio - clearly, remembering to put it in my pocket after 2 hours of copas, shines, single, double and even quadruple turns* was expecting a bit much. Always one to cling to superficial simulacrum of zen, I accepted its absence.
I went into town and did my grocery shopping.
While man-about-towning, I'd find myself worrying my pocket. Checking for that yoke that was not there [the phone... obviously]. Phantom-phone syndrome. An unconscious tick. Nothing more. I'm telling you.
Half a day without the ball-and-chain, I felt liberated and naughty, like pulling a sicky. Forsooth, all good things come to an end. The sports centre staff found the phone and reunited me with it.
My Stockholme syndrom begins anew.
It beeps. It buzzes. It looms.
My musings of enslavement to a hand held device are not novel. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift pokes fun at the pocket watch. His Lilliputians hypothesize that it is either "an unknown animal or a God that he worships". They felt the latter more likely since "he seldom did anything without consulting it".
P.S. If this has evoked an dormant feelings of confinement by and resentment towards this impossibly handy piece of kit we call a phone, then, by golly, you are ready for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08
Brian Rice [read with the gravitas of the Times]** describes it as "...the best rant ever..." And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to shout out a window.
*I did the doubles myself, but I made the girls do the quadruples :)
** He is my guru after all
I went into town and did my grocery shopping.
While man-about-towning, I'd find myself worrying my pocket. Checking for that yoke that was not there [the phone... obviously]. Phantom-phone syndrome. An unconscious tick. Nothing more. I'm telling you.
Half a day without the ball-and-chain, I felt liberated and naughty, like pulling a sicky. Forsooth, all good things come to an end. The sports centre staff found the phone and reunited me with it.
My Stockholme syndrom begins anew.
It beeps. It buzzes. It looms.
My musings of enslavement to a hand held device are not novel. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift pokes fun at the pocket watch. His Lilliputians hypothesize that it is either "an unknown animal or a God that he worships". They felt the latter more likely since "he seldom did anything without consulting it".
P.S. If this has evoked an dormant feelings of confinement by and resentment towards this impossibly handy piece of kit we call a phone, then, by golly, you are ready for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08
Brian Rice [read with the gravitas of the Times]** describes it as "...the best rant ever..." And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to shout out a window.
*I did the doubles myself, but I made the girls do the quadruples :)
** He is my guru after all
