A day of silence

My iPhone and I are friends. I rely on it (I've never assigned gender, although my car is female and my iPad is, ummm, male, I think) to find me when needed and to get me the people I need when I need them. I don't tax its systems. If I'm home and the call is local, I use the house phone. My iPhone is for contacts and calendars and quick "dialing."

So when I went to Canton Trade Days last Friday and found I had No Service, I wasn't particularly bothered. It was a very busy day. Great weather and people everywhere. Of course, the lines would be busy. But when I consistently had No Service--not even a lonely little bar which would indicate I might not get a call out but I could at least try--I started to feel a bit of anxiety. What if somebody needed me? I couldn't even access my travel partner to confirm our rendezvous. I started to listen to the loud speaker very carefully.

Then I noticed there were fewer people than usual talking on their cell phones. The place is normally a hotbed of cellular conversation, everything from "I'll deal with that when I get home" to "I told you I was going to Canton" to "Where did you say that was located?" Some people were chatting away, but most were not.

There'd been a huge storm in the vicinity a few days earlier. Had a tower gone down? No one mentioned it. I turned on my iPad and it showed a cellular signal, but I couldn't get a play out on Words with Friends. The dial spun and spun and spun and would still be spinning if we were there, I think.

We were halfway home before my friend got a call on her phone, a sure sign that civilization wasn't far away. But it was a lonely day at Canton and I realized just how dependent I am on the idea of always being in touch.

The case of the disappearing phone book

It's that time of year again, when the new phone books start appearing on your doorstep, or on our driveway, as the case was. We have several phones, which I thought used to get you one new book per, but obviously not. Then, just when I thought we'd have one and one only, a second one was tossed onto the drive. One upstairs, one downstairs, along with the new advertisement-heavy county book, and we're in business for the next year.

It doesn't really matter how many new ones we have though, as the phone book which counts in our house, is the one in the kitchen. I keep all notes on new phone numbers and addresses, work and cell numbers, too, if I have them, in it. Then, when the new book is here, I carefully transfer all of that over, from the old margins into the new. Absent two new phone books, the old kitchen book goes upstairs by the bed for a prolonged life.

Going through the phone book like this is an opportunity to weed out people who no longer live here. But it would appear the phone company has been doing some weeding also. Our phone book has dropped from 2007's 37 pages to 2008's 34.

Where have all the people gone? The population of the town seems stable enough, never mind several good friends have left for jobs elsewhere and our social calendar has taken a huge spur-of-the-moment hit. I think part of the three page loss can be attributed to cell phones.

Several households I know have nothing else. A cell-phone-only world has some disadvantages, as I'm sure those on the Gulf Coast can attest in the wake of Hurricane Ike dispensing with cell service. Also, one's physical address is essentially a mystery if not in the phone book. (Don't ask why you weren't invited to a party if no one knows where you are.) Personally, while we were early adopters of cordless phones, there's nothing like a good old landline for security and lack of electricity. But the number of people who think that is shrinking.

Who knows but in a few years I may be adding pages to the phone book to put in all the cell numbers and physical addresses I have managed to accumulate.