Cell Phone Olympics

Never had a group of men taken pride in who had the smallest, commented one participant some years ago after he noticed in a business conference in Europe that the latest mobile or cell phones were getting smaller.

For reasons lucid to the techno-savvy and incomprehensible to the techno-simpleton, small is better; the more expensive, the more upwardly mobile or, by some maze of logic, more successful.

The world of mobile electronic communications begot smaller, fuller and costlier phones, like a parallel universe to the time-honored Faster, Higher, and Stronger motto of the Olympics.

Paranoia made me a non-player in this cell phone Olympics, though.  I may leave an expensive cell phone somewhere as I often leave umbrellas anywhere.  I don’t wish for sleepless nights counting the cost of what I’ve lost.

Someone I know once left his cell phone in a taxi.  Luckily it was an honest taxi driver who found it first.  Unluckily he recognized business when it presented itself.  He asked for a thousand pesos for the cell phone’s return.  Because it cost no less than five thousand, the owner grudgingly agreed.

A cell phone may also be snatched by gangs who’ve made a living out of cell phones, which are not theirs.  Once, inside a public ride in Manila, my face was inches away from a knife menacingly used to threaten a fellow passenger to give up his cell phone.  The robber in denim pants, white t-shirt and baseball cap who got what he wanted blended and disappeared in a wink among a throng of pedestrians.

I was nearest the young-man-as-victim and my terror was boundless.  He may be run over by a speeding vehicle, I assured him feebly after I made sense of what had happened.  He smiled at my cruel wish anyhow, but his cell phone was no more.

Okay, add a dash of age to my paranoia if you may.  The X-generation (those born after 1964; why that year I don’t know) and those that follow them are more at home with these contraptions.  These are the ‘in’ toys, so to speak.  For me they are just a convenience for urgent calls and text messages, including jokes that I deem urgent because I need not laugh alone.

Call them money traps as well.  Our cell phone servers have endless ideas on how to make cell phone owners spend some more.  I was cruelly awakened from a nap by the sound of a text message.

So-and-so actor/singer can be your text mate, it said.  Irritated, I fired back with ‘S_ _ _, leave me alone!’  They don’t have my instincts, whoever they are who programmed those computers to entice the innocents.  ‘Congratulations!  You have been linked…,’ it answered back.  Never had I been congratulated for a cuss word.

Yet this contagion has not spared those born before 1964.  A reunion with former college mates called for the use of cell phones sometime during the day.  I bought mine only because I need it for my business, said one.  How gracious of her to explain away her expensive cell phone.  Had she not said it while glancing at my cell phone, I may not have entertained the idea that she was apologizing for me.

This brings me to my five-year-old cell phone that I’m proud of. It underwent one thorough repair after I threw it against the wall in an experiment with lateral gravity, otherwise known as a fit of rage.  Let’s just say that it was best to have it repaired rather than replaced with a new one.  It is better to have thrown an old cell phone than never to have thrown at all…  Having a new and expensive one will keep me from that.

I wished for one thing though that’s costlier and smaller last Christmas but was too embarrassed to ask the husband.  I could have promised him that I’d never throw a diamond against a wall.  He gave me a new small cell phone instead.  It looks like a child of my own cell phone, he had said.

Though it took me days to learn how to use my new cell phone, it is simple like the old one; no camera or recording or whatever. It is just as well considering my kid brother’s logic.  Sure, one can have the most advanced cell phone with camera and all, he had said, but does it have a mosquito net?

Inspired thus, while in a restaurant I picked up my shoe, held it like a telephone, and talked to it.  Nothing could be more technologically advanced than that.  To my table mates’ disquiet, I enjoyed myself, especially when those loud talkers at the next table stopped talking about the latest cell phone models.

If I were an Olympian, I would have chosen figure skating for Winter Olympics or synchronized swimming for the Summer Games.  But since the accessible game nowadays may be cell phone competitions, make me, then, the champion shoe-talker.

(Feb 2006)