Peak phone is similar to peak beard, a point
reached a few months ago where fewer people thought beards were handsome and
more people felt they were just places for last night’s spaghetti. But peak
phone is more than just itchy neurotic stroking. To truly understand peak phone, you have to go
back to a period when apps were still sperm swimming in technology’s testicles.
The first cell phones were called car phones because
they were about as big as an AMC Pacer. But they were cool because they were new.
Plus you could be driving and call someone to tell them you were driving and almost
finish that sentence before you were cut off. Then, in just a few short years, people
were walking around with iPhones in their pockets, ready at a moment’s notice
to send and/or receive videos of monkeys smelling their fingers. But even
cooler than the phones themselves was talking about phones and how advanced we
were downloading the latest app that could tell you how many eggs were in your
refrigerator.
That age of innocence is past. Today anyone who announces
that cell phones have more computing power than a 1970’s IBM machine the size
of a brick apartment building is followed by awkward silence because everyone is
ignoring him while they see when their eggs expire. No one is impressed by how amazing
cell phones are. We have reached that peak and we are on the way down the other
side.
I know this because the other day I was sitting
alone in a restaurant assuring the waitress that my friends were really coming
and I was sure I had the right place and I wasn’t sitting by myself looking at a
warm beer on purpose, when I pulled out my Nokia flip phone and noticed I had
23 unread messages. Later that evening when I finally sat down to a table
filled with empty plates and half finished glasses of wine, I got very limited
sympathy from my friends. See it turns out that in the post-peak phone era, I
have an obligation to check messages every five minutes to find out which restaurant
were are going to and see the latest picture of someone’s cheesecake. And if by
some chance I wait a full hour to check messages, I am a Luddite who will be
fired from my job and forced to work as a typist in a museum diorama.
Post peak phone is here and we are faced with
the stupid predicament that all that time we were supposed to be saving is now time
we are obligated to spend. Sorry I can’t write more, but I have to see when my
eggs expire.
