He’s Come Undone

After getting my very first text message ever from Jess a few years back, and learning my phone did not know what to do with it, I upgraded my phone. Then I became a text message addict. Sometimes I would wake up at 3am or 4am for a glass of water or a bathroom break and casually glance at my cell phone to see if that red light was blinking, indicating a new text message. I was hooked.

After taking a new job last year, my employer assigned to me a device called a Blackberry. Sure, I had heard about them. I had seen people punching buttons on the subway and suspected it was one of these newfangled Blackberry gadgets. I was correct. To me, a new gadget to play with and figure out was exciting for a while. That excitement gradually diminished to indifference and then finally to dread. I needed a Blackberry Break. Especially since many of the people with whom I work can be anywhere around the globe. Emails can arrive all hours of the night. And they do arrive at all hours. When I wake up for the day, I pick up the Blackberry and open one email, and only one email: the one from weather.com that tells me the day’s weather forecast. That helps me decide what shoes to wear. (Did that sound COMPLETELY gay?)

What I am learning now, though, is that I can survive quite well without either my personal cell phone or my employer’s Blackberry. (I never really liked talking on the phone, anyway.) For example, if I have plans for after work, such as happy hour or dinner or whatever, I just go at the predetermined time. If the person/people I am planning to meet is/are not there, no problem! If I had planned to enjoy happy hour or dinner, I still want either a drink or some food. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can figure out that if someone doesn’t show, that means something must have come up. We can just talk the next day and reschedule! People who might have an emergency and need to reach me have my home phone number. I’m guessing that around 75% of the time during the week now, I leave my devices safely tucked away in a backpack or something similar so that I don’t see them. And come the weekend, I have been leaving my devices at home—completely! It is so liberating!

Now that I know I really and truly don’t need to always be “connected,” I have experimented with being out of touch for up to 36 hours straight in the past few weeks. It’s becoming easier and easier to consciously leave the gadgets behind and live like it was 1999.

I don’t mean for this to be some great act of rebellion but rather a reconnection to a simpler time. A time before Blackberries, cell phones, and the like. A time when dinners were not interrupted by the ringing of a phone at someone else’s table.

My Blackberry Breaks have been pretty successful so far. I am finding myself more and more comfortable being out of touch. After all, I am not in a business where people’s lives hang in the balance if I am not immediately reachable. Personally, I suppose it makes it easier since I am a rather predictable creature, anyway. If I am planning to go to happy hour, there is a 99% chance I can be found at one of two watering holes on 58th Street. Dinner during the week is usually either at Wendy’s or at home. On the weekends, I become REALLY boring, so no one wants to get in touch with me, anyway. That’s pretty much my simple life as long as I am not traveling.

The downside is that I fear my behavior might become like that of a reformed smoker: proselytizing and complaining and just generally being bitchy to those who treat their wireless devices as though they were an umbilical cord (ironically) without which they would shrivel up and die from malnutrition. I fear this because I have already felt it. But so far, I have managed to hold my tongue. After all, what is good for me may not be good for everyone else. Or anyone else for that matter.