Whatever Happened to Sarah?
17 Apr 2007
I’m no fan of cell phones. Granted, this puts me in a small minority, since most folks today appear to be in love with their cellular devices. They cuddle them to their cheeks and whisper sweet nothings into them, even while darting in and out of traffic in motor vehicles at accelerated rates of speed. I must admit that cell phones have come a long way from those original $12.00-a-minute ones that resembled World War II walky-talkies. Today, they are razor-thin with unlimited minutes and can be used to play computer games, access the Internet, take pictures or make a video. Still, I can’t help but believe that our lives would be simpler without them.
I fondly recall those days when I could at least find solitude in my car. There, away from the phones in my office and home, as well as from the avalanche of emails daily dropped on me at my computer station, I was unreachable. No more; however, thanks to those cursed cell phones. Now I can be aggravated all of the time. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?
I will admit that I don’t fully understand or appreciate the myriad of uses the modern cell phone affords us. For instance, my daughter can pick one up and start pushing buttons and the next thing you know it’s playing the Star-Spangled Banner, text messaging a zillion people, calling a friend in Ottawa, and showing today’s Dow Jones average. I, on the other hand, can’t even figure out why people want them to take photographs. For the life of me, I don’t ever remember holding a phone receiver in my hand and saying to myself, “I wish this thing could take pictures.”
Do you remember when phone operators named Sarah connected us to real people? We actually used the phone to ask needed questions to real people who provided us with useful information. Not anymore. Today, we get putout with unneeded output from computers with nothing to offer but insufficient input. How many of us have not wasted gobs of time listening to computerized options—none of which we needed—only to hear in the end, “If you would like to hear this menu again, please, press one.” What we’d really like to do is ring the guy’s neck who came up with that contraption.
Well, if you’re like me, having trouble mastering the myriad uses of the modern cell phone, hold on to your hat. It appears that our little modern marvel is about to become indispensable to our future existence upon this planet. Thanks to a new generation of bar codes, we’ll soon be able to point our cell phone at everyday objects and receive on our cell phone’s screen information in the form of videos, pictures or text files. For instance, in Japan, McDonald’s customers are already pointing their cell phones at hamburger wrappers and receiving nutrition information on their screens. How about that? You need a cell phone for a Big Mac. Who’da thunk it?
According to a senior researcher for Hewlett-Packard, we’ll soon be able to point our cell phones—the Swiss Army knives of technology—at billboards to receive quotes from insurance companies and movie trailers from motion picture studios. We’ll also be able to point them at real estate signs for asking prices, drug prescriptions for medical information and groceries for expiration dates. One of the most popular uses in Japan is paperless airline tickets. To board a flight all you do is wave the code on your cell phone screen over an airport scanner.
For some time now I’ve felt imprisoned by all of this modern-day technology. I’ve felt like it saps life of the personal and turns everything into something automated, sentencing us all to solitary confinement. We used to know our insurance and real estate agents, our pharmacists and our grocers. We use to talk to one another, not to machines. Now, however, all we need is a cell phone and some inanimate object to point it at. If you ask me, those new bar codes for cell phones are cell bars we’ll never be able to escape from.
Don Walton
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