Today I was reminded how completely dependent on my cell phone I have become.
I left Florida in the wee hours this morning to attend several meetings in Washington. As a consequence I turned the thing on at the unusual hour of 3:30 a.m. (I was staying an hour or so from the Orlando Airport and my flight departed at 6 a.m. I know, why would anyone do that to oneself? Believe me, it was the only way I could get to my 9:30 a.m. meeting with Steve Johnson, the EPA administrator.)
My only call was to Jacqueline to let her know that I had landed safely at Dulles and was making my way via one of those elevated bus-like contraptions to the main terminal and my taxi downtown. Since I was going into a meeting I silenced my phone. After the meeting I walked with several colleagues to a nearby office where I convened a meeting of the Board of the Health Effects Institute. My phone was still banished, tucked away in my coat slung over a chair. I considered my phone at rest.
And since I was trying earnestly to bring our meeting to an earlier conclusion, in a vain effort (as it turned out) to catch an earlier plane back to Jacqueline and Sam in Florida, I did not so much as touch my cell phone until after we had adjourned at 3 p.m. or so. As quickly as I could say my goodbyes I went down to the street and hailed a taxi back to Dulles. Not surprisingly my phone informed me that I had a number of messages.
Now this is not one of those very fancy phones that lets you collect your e-mail and such. I guess I could get text messages on it, but I haven’t mastered that skill. For me it is just a way to make a phone call without the booth and the dime (is it still a dime?). I have to punch in *86 and then my code to retrieve the voice mails that make it clear who called and, if I am lucky, what they wanted and whether it is urgent.
But to my chagrin I discovered that my phone did not have enough juice to get through to my automatic message center. And when I checked the slick “missed calls” feature I found a series of unrecognizable numbers. Who, I was left to wonder, called about what.
Now I am not especially comfortable being out of touch with the office. So I made my way to the United Red Carpet Club to use the phones in their business center. Only then did I realize that I have not had any sort of phone card in five years—ever since I returned from India and signed up for my first cell phone. Nor did I know the code that would let me charge a call to my home phone—or to the office phone for that matter.
How did this happen? Marooned by a wonderful technology that I have come to take for granted. I suppose I have used my cell phone so much that its battery is giving up the ghost—in spite of my unwavering ritual of recharging it overnight. Oh, perhaps that is it. I didn’t really have an overnight last night.
So I am simply going to have to hope that nothing disastrous happened in my absence (a reasonably safe bet, given the high quality of the leadership team looking after CC and its students). And I might even have time to read the stack of magazines and articles I stick in my backpack as regularly as I charge my phone—but seldom have a moment to read. I might even finish the New York Times crossword puzzle and pick up a paperback at the Borders I passed as I headed toward the Red Carpet Club.
On the one hand, I am eager for the next breakthrough in battery technology so that I can have a solid 20 hours of talk time on my cell. On the other hand, maybe my battery is trying to tell me something.
