The curse of the blinking orange light

Pinnacle moments in ones life demand battery power.  Take a recent jaunt along the Anthony Henday, a major highway that circles Edmonton.  Now, to be fair, this was no regular jaunt with two increasingly vocal children in the back seat.  This was a well orchestrated and mandated jaunt to vacate our house for yet another showing.  Sell house sell! On that particular night we were also in the midst of locking down a pending deal on our home.  Each phone call from our realtor mattered.  Each tidbit of information essential.
I was a wreck; no cell phone and completely reliant on my husband's POC (piece of crap), juice sucking blackberry.

We get the call.  The phone starts to send out its distressing beeps.  We get the pertinent info.  We hang up.  We wait.  I stare at the blinking orange low battery light, my hope is fading on all fronts.  I curse technology. The kids are cursing their own complaints in the back.

I scan the Henday for a sign of what I need most - a reliable, trust worthy, warm, battery free, honest to goodness pay phone. Please.




I jot down our realtor's number hoping I don't have to use it and a quarter, or is it 35 cents to make a call.  And then I wonder are these calls even possible anymore? I remember as a kid seeing payphone booths on the side of the highway between Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.  Convenient boxes providing a link to someone, somewhere.  Alas, the phone booth is a relic of the past, ancient techno history really, back when carbon emissions were figments of only a few people's imaginations.

So, with draining battery power and the need to know what may happen next we swerved off the Henday heading towards downtown, seeing the refuge of a telephone booth, or more likely the recharger cord from my husband's desk at work.

And we made it, just it time, or rather the pending deal arrived just in time, before orange light faded to black. The deal on our home, not as dramatic.

And while on the topic of payphones, check these out.

Doesn't this make you feel warm.  All these people just chatting away, absorbed in their own conversations, but still together and not just walking aimlessly down the street or plugged into their cyborg headsets.


Classic British boxes. One of these beauties could be yours for $3200 Cdn. The tiny phone houses have been on British streets for 75 years and the country's phone company is selling them.  The reason, nobody uses them, or I reckon nobody uses them for the purpose they were intended for anymore.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135919/For-2-000-red-phone-box-BT-sell-iconic-landmarks-demand-slumps.html


Or this one, changing with the times.  This one is in Brazil.  People there wanted to celebrate the old technology so they asked artists to turn old phone booths into art attractions. 

A Book that Inspires and Alarms

I've been meaning to write about this book, Super Sad True Love Story http://supersadtruelovestory.com/, by Gary Shteyngart, for some time.  It's one of those books that love it or hate it, you can't escape it. It offers a haunting and dystopic glimpse into our future as a society dependent on technology, or as Shteyngart calls it, the apparat.

The apparat is a device, much like our smart phones, that lives on people's hips guiding them what to do, what to buy, where to live, what to wear.  It can also broadcast your fu**ability score to those around you, beam up your financial and health information to nearby light stands for all to see and if that wasn't enough, you can broadcast yourself anytime of day to your thousands of "friends." Sound familiar?  I thought it did. Facebook already allows users to broadcast their location and just in case you need MORE friends, apparently facebook has an app out soon that will connect with your friends friends in person.   Say you're at a pub.  A friend of a friend is sitting near by.  You're both gazing into your apparats, sorry smart phones, oblivious and oh so lonely.  And bing, bing, bing (hear three bells here) facebook, oh glorious fbook, will connect you, let you know your compatibility score with prospective new friend just three bar stools away.  What's next, an app to tell you what to say word for word when you meet new friend of a friend?


Shteyngart's apparat also allows the government to track you. And yes, we are being tracked. Companies know where we've been online, where we're likely to go, and with each day more digital footprints paint a path of who we are, what we do, what we buy and how we vote.

In the book characters are empty shells, unfeeling, dispassionate souls seeking connections through the Internet and through their online personas.  No one talks, they text.  No one reads, books stink. And everybody is busy ranking and being ranked. In Shteyngart's world technology aims to make people happier but it's clear more people are disconnected, lonely and ultimately much sadder. I was astounded by the parallels between our own versions of Utube and other social media sites and how people continue to search for answers and a sense of belonging online.

This book is a warning, one part fascinating and one part alarming.  A must read for future citizens of the Inter webs.

Links worth a glimpse:

Interview with Gary Shteyngart.  Definitely worth the read.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/will-social-media-make-us-anti-social-a-talk-with-gary-shteyngart/247373/

Technology columinst for the Daily Telegraph in the UK and her take on the Super Sad True Love Story:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/blackberry/8822808/A-vision-of-life-without-my-BlackBerry.html