Finally, I have succumbed to the craze. After several years of resistance on my part, the battering ram of popular practice has broken down my defenses. I have joined the ranks of cell phone users.

Now, fortunately, I have gained access to all sorts of new social privileges.

At airports, I can talk more loudly than ever before. Other passengers, while waiting in the lounge for their next flight, will share the privilege of listening in on my conversations. They can follow blow-by-blow accounts of my latest fall-out with a friend or a giant business deal about to come together. And it will all come at a high pitch of volume ensuring that whatever attention they had been giving to reading a best seller or holding a face-to-face conversation with a companion will have to give way to my talk.

I can also demonstrate my personal importance by receiving calls during professional meetings or at lunch with friends. Associates will surely be impressed as a dark-blue device smaller than my hand relays a message from a friend in San Francisco or Paris. Up to now they may have considered me as an old guy of not much account in the larger world, but they will now realize that I rate. Friends will come to know even better how widely I am known from coast to coast and abroad.

People can now reach me even during the Sunday liturgy in my parish church. The priest may be approaching the most solemn part, commemorating the Last Supper of Jesus, but I will rattle on about the next party on my social schedule. And the same priest’s efforts to present a coherent sermon will be enhanced by the pseudo-musical ring of my phone.

Another benefit comes in my no longer needing to walk around town unaccompanied. Now abject solitude will find relief any time I want. In my town, however, so many people are already talking to themselves without need of a cell phone that they should not easily presume I am using one. Perhaps this fact will motivate me to talk even more loudly into my new hand-held device so that everyone will recognize me as in touch and not isolated.

If I leave the cell phone connected, then I can also hope for someone to contact me during a movie. Others in the theater, absorbed as they are in their popcorn and ongoing conversation with the person next to them, will surely not mind if I interrupt Renée Zellweger or Sean Penn in whatever they are trying to say.

Also I will feel free to drive my car while talking with friends in the Berkshires or snowbirds in Florida. It will serve as a pleasant relief from devoting tiresome attention to the roadway. Maybe cats and dogs will run some risk of encountering me but I suspect that most humans will escape my onrushing Toyota.  

Perhaps the phone will prove valuable during Sunday softball games as well. When stranded at second base (a fairly rare event, given my batting prowess), I can talk with someone at home (in either sense), relieving the tedium created by a pitcher who cannot get the ball over the plate.

Also routine physical exams can be rather boring, especially when your doctor does not have much to say. I heard recently of a patient who carried on a cell phone conversation during the process, a practice that strikes me as a fine remedy for the ho-humness of so much medical practice.

Readers can gather from the irony in all of the above what were the factors that kept me from purchasing a cell phone up to now. So much about the use of these devices puts me off. I consider them to have unleashed a torrent of anti-social habits like those parodied here.

Paradoxically enough, a gadget invented to put people in touch with one another too often alienates us. Rather than enhancing the pleasure of being in the actual presence of others, it abstracts people from the present situation in favor of a distant relationship. I begrudge having the person I am talking with spurn me for someone else far removed.

Despite these gripes, however, I also hail the cell phone as one of the finest inventions of our time. Especially for those of us in later life, it comes as a great boon. Used selectively, it enhances both our social life and our security. If we should need assistance at almost any time, help can be more easily summoned than ever before.

Joseph Coughlin of MIT's AgeLab shares this view of mine. He considers it a model of the way technology can serve the needs of later life. Like so many other inventions, it looks easy and obvious, but that’s only after it been invented.

Again, despite my reservations about its misuse, we are lucky to have it.

Richard Griffin