I Hate My Cell Phone

W. BRUCE CAMERON

My cell phone has a special app that allows me to eject Alec Baldwin from an airplane. I can look up a recipe for bananas flambe or find the nearest fire extinguisher to put the bananas flamb-out. It's a "smart phone," so intelligent that I recently caught it looking for an app to replace me.

We don't get along very well, my phone and I (it has sent me a list of therapists in case I want to try couples counseling). Basically, the reason I don't like my cell phone is that I hate it. We often have conversations like this:

Me: Call home.

Phone: Calling Mom.

Me: No! Stop! Cancel!

Phone: Connecting.

Me: Hang up!

Mom: Hello?

Me: Hi, Mom. I dialed you by accident.

Mom: You're not texting while driving, are you?

Me: No. I dialed you by accident.

Mom: Are you using your cell phone while driving?

Me: No, I'm not in the car.

Mom: Where are you?

Me: I'm outside a coffee shop.

Mom: What on earth are you doing there?

Me: I ... look, sorry, I dialed you by accident.

Mom: How much coffee are you drinking? I worry about you.

Me: I have to go.

Phone: Call disconnected.

Me: What a stupid phone! I didn't say to call my mom, I said to call home! Home!

Phone: Calling Mom.

Before cell phones became so smart, you could rely on them to do one thing, which was generate a cell phone bill. Maybe you couldn't locate the nearest vegan shoe repair store or call up an image of what you would look like if your father had been a chicken, but you could punch in a phone number and immediately you would be gratified to hear: "Your cell phone is out of range. Please return to your calling area."

"Calling area" was loosely defined as "inside the cell tower." If you weren't inside the tower, you were considered to be "roaming," as if you were a horse who had broken out of the corral and was now out on the prairie somewhere, eating grass. As anyone will tell you, horses are very expensive, so logically roaming charges were, as well. Fortunately most calling plans now allow you to call anyone within the country, as long as it's your mother.

My cell phone is so smart it screens all my calls -- meaning, it literally screens all my calls. I can't actually answer it when it rings, because instead of pushing a button I have to swipe my finger on the glass surface, and my phone doesn't like me to put my fingers on the glass.

At the cell phone store, they said they could fix my phone by upgrading me for a few hundred dollars if I would give them a two-year commitment not to put my fingers on other cell phones. When I insisted that being able to answer telephone calls was, in my opinion, somewhat of a standard feature for a phone, they pointed out that I should be tossing electronic birds instead of wasting my time talking to people. They checked my call log.

"All you ever do is call your mother," they sneered.

"That's because my phone won't let me call anyone else!" I yelled.

"Whatever you say, Momma's Boy."

"Try it," I challenged.

"OK," one guy said, grabbing the phone. "Call Lithuanian Consulate."

"Calling Lithuanian Embassy, Office of the Consulate," my phone intoned.

"I hate my phone!" I stormed.

"It's an inanimate object. You can't hate it, that's crazy," the cell phone guy said.

My phone provided a list of in-patient psychiatric facilities on its screen while someone squawked from its speaker "Wodel jus man skambina? Paskambinkite savo motina!"*

(*Why are you calling me? Call your mother!)

Eventually they decided that to fix my phone they needed to "wipe" it, sort of the electronic equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. This meant I lost all my apps, including the one that let me be Lady Gaga. On the plus side, I can now answer my phone with a single swipe.

My mother calls. "Are you driving?" she asks. "Don't answer if you're driving."

I hate my cell phone.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011

CREATORS.COM