On the Hatred of Phones

I feel a little like Andy Rooney when he did his glorious rants on 60 minutes.
Or Colombo (the detective famous for "just one more thing ...")

I used to work for AT&T but for the computer division, not the phone system. So I'm somewhat sympathetic to the phone company for its history, advances in technology (particularly Bell Labs) and how it invades everyone's lives since it's now an essential utility, almost as essential as air and water. Particularly as cities remove all the police & fire alarm boxes. 911 service is so reliable that it makes the news with it fails for even a few minutes. But it disenfranchises anyone without a cellphone to report emergencies.

When I returned to college for my masters' degree, my first course was ubiquitous/Pervasive computing. A lot of it was watching science fiction movies for "the future as we saw it". We discussed what predictions were right, what were wrong and such. Cellphones that you cannot turn off were considered dystopian. Big brother, constant surveillance. Firesign Theatre's "Nick Danger and the case of the missing shoe" seemed silly back then: the phone company stealing everybody's left show and implanting a phone that makes a call every time you walk. It was like Get Smart's Shoephone: a silly gag. But now it's real with nannyphones that track the kids every movement for the parents. There's a court case where an employee was fired for refusing to use a phone app that tracked her ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE, reporting it to the employer. Mike Agranoff's "The Ballad of Captain Crunch" got it right: we're all going to have phones implanted in our ear/head and WE CAN NEVER TURN IT OFF! The only time you won't get an answer is when the person is dead :-0

And so it goes (to quote my favorite news program NBC Overnight)

Removing pay phones "disenfranchises anyone without a cell phone to report emergencies". *So true*! One public phone per square half-mile should be *mandatory*!