Los Gatos Weekly-Times

What is everyone talking about on cell phones?

By Carl Heintze

Everyone in this valley seems to have a cellular phone. I don't.

Well, under duress I will admit that we do own a car phone, but it's not active. It came with the car, but we couldn't figure out who would want to call us while we were driving, so it just sits there, its little face staring at me blankly when I drive. We also couldn't remember anyone whom we needed to call from the car. I suppose a highway patrol officer or a towing service might be in order, but we don't travel away from home by car that much.

Sometimes I think I'll screw the antennae into its post on the back window, just as a status symbol. But I haven't. That would make our car look like every other car I see whizzing past me, those BMWs and Mercedeses driven by slick young men and pretty young women dressed for business, car phones at the ear, transmitting some important message like "Did you remember to get a loaf of bread?" or "Was I supposed to pick up the kids today?"

In fact, I don't know what they're really talking about. I base my assumptions about telephoning from the car on the recent movie One Fine Day, in which cellular telephones were a key part of the plot.

It is the first movie in which cellular phones are so integral to the story, although Helen Mirren, the anti-heroine of the BBC series Prime Suspect, seems to spend a lot of the time on a cellular phone, too.

She's chasing crooks who manage to get to their cellular phones before she does until, of course, the last episode, when even their telephones fail to keep them from being nabbed by Scotland Yard.

So crooks in real life do use cellular phones, I gather, especially drug dealers, to whom they are a big boon. No technological marvel is without its price, even the cellular telephone.

Since I possess, but don't use, a portable phone, I suppose, also, that it's not my place to criticize the increasing use of portable phones. But it does seem to me they are pretty much unnecessary.

Maybe that's because I grew up in a time when most of us had party lines and most messages weren't so urgent that we couldn't wait until someone else got off the line. Nowadays, though, in an age of instant communication, all that seems archaic and old-fashioned, what with satellites revolving around the earth and telephones that threaten to let us not only talk to others over a long distance but also see them, as well as technology that lets you check "call waiting" and unload a batch of messages off your answering machine from a remote location.

We demand instant access; we are showered with the somewhat questionable benefits of the World Wide Web and the Internet; and national, local and international telephone companies recently agreed they were going to lower telephone rates all over the world (believe that, if you want to).

What Alexander Graham Bell wrought threatens to become Dick Tracy's wristwatch. There are still a few holdouts. I have a doctor friend who refuses to have a beeper, a cellular or a car phone. "The only peace and quiet I get," he says, "is the time between calls. I can't avoid them at the office, but I can in transit."

But most physicians, a lot of plumbers, air conditioning repairmen and who knows who else now retain instant communication with their patients, clients or customers. This allows them to say such things as "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning," "I can't make it today, but I think I can get there next Wednesday" and "I'll call you right back."

For obviously, it's not the telephone itself which facilitates communication; it is the person or persons using it. In One Fine Day, that certainly was true. True communication between the cellular phone-crossed lovers wasn't really established until they put their phones away and used the human touch, as it were. Then they really communicated.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.