cellphone(less).

I'm currently sitting in my cubicle, listening to the man next to me breath fairly heavily between gulps of Diet Coke.
It is Monday, our big production day here at the paper. There is usually a flurry of activity around the office throughout the day, but today everyone is intently working on their own projects. We use the interoffice telephone system to talk to one another, dialing the numbers that will connect us to people whose voices we will hear echoing through the building even before they pick up the receiver.
I forgot my cellphone this morning during my hustle to fill my coffee with sugar and my eyes with back country highways. Now I wish I would have remembered it. My day is entirely too chained to my cellphone. Weather, sports, Facebook, text messaging, incoming calls, planning, a number of on-line papers, and any assortment of other things go out the window completely for me once I have accepted a day without cellular communication.
Maybe I have a dependency, maybe we all do. Every police officer I see sliding through the corner of an intersection seems to have a telephone plastered to his ear, one hand on the wheel. The legislators want to instigate sweeping reform to ban this phenomenon, but they will more than likely find that the criminals in place will hesitate to stop an act they all commit, and that will turn enforcement into a hard road.
Cell phones are my typical avoidance. Any socially awkward, marginally boring or potentially stressful situation is always cause to pull out my Q and check the most up to date Facebook postings, Major League box scores, or even page read Wikipedia. It is my great time waster, but only when the time needs to be wasted.
When things need to get done and I have missions to accomplish or conquer, it is my greatest aid. From SmartPhone directories to calculators, it makes my processes go more smoothly. The key sequences lead me between numbers I usually call in the same order, making my shift between bosses, parents, go to guys, and my girlfriend all easily navigable at 55 mph during my commute.
When on the road, it has become my navigator. I have never been interested in pulling over for directions, usually sighting '90's slasher flicks as the most tangible reason. I rely constantly on a 8 x 10 map of Iowa that is tucked into the back of my driver's seat, but now, if I encounter a situation where county roads prove to insignificant for mapping, I have the piece of mind that Google Maps is likely to help me instead of a cut-throat serial killer from the corn fields.
I have sharp math skills, but they are not sharp enough for some concepts. My phone, with the aid of some software, can now function as a scientific calculator. I rarely use it as such, but it is convenient on occasion. Usually I am just looking to see what the deposit on a case of beers will be, but that knowledge comes in handy as well.
I feel out of the loop already, my watch reads 11:30, but it is still earlier than that, I run ahead on my own time. I know the load is starting to accumulate: messages, texts, notifications, events, and other such litter of humanity is invading my basement to stack icons along the top of my flickering screen. Stuck on loud it will surely disrupt the house all day, there is no unlocking and stopping the madness as long as I am counties away.
We work as a team, and today, there will be no such work. I tried to send out e-mail notification to those who will notice my lack of communication. No one relies on e-mail, so no one has returned my message to assure me that the world will not indeed collapse if I am off the grid throughout the day.
I can only imagine my lady friend trapped in despair because she assumes incorrectly that I am ignoring her through out the day. Once the paper is completed I will reveal that her agony was all in vain.
Most importantly, my cell phone makes time go faster. Like I mentioned previously, I always run my watches ahead of time, 8 to 10 minutes roughly depending on what I use the individual watch for. Cell phones are heavily relied on throughout the American populace, and with a ten minute jump on everyone else, I manage to stay ahead. However, when late for work and panic starts to grip my cardiovascular system, I can always look at my telephone and be assured that I still have enough time to either finish haphazardly or make a quick get away before the situation worsens. Now, I have no such luxury. I am just stuck ahead, wishing the minutes would fall off the clock more quickly.
We are well ahead on the paper, all of the A section I had completed around ten or so, and Chris, the gentleman I mentioned earlier sitting in the cubicle next to mine, seems to be nearly done with the Sports section. Everyone else is still hammering away and proofing, designing, and sending the pages across the air signals so they can be printed miles away and delivered to the citizens of this small town tomorrow.
Everything is very quiet, just the occasional snap of an aspertain shot as a soda can tab pops somewhere in the building. I am clicking away noisily, and they all must know that I have nothing of volume to be typing. Today is Monday. Monday is not for writing.
Monday is built around cups of coffee, Quark Express 4.1, drop shadows, text fills and color correction. It is bursting with spell checks, style sheets, and snappy conversations. Everyone is hard at it, even though they all know we will be done well ahead of schedule. It's nose to the grindstone ethics around here most days, but I have been trying to preserve my facial features for years.
I got in early and finished my pages, a few holes that needed to be patched on A8 and B10. I clicked through the process that only required one computer re-start, a relatively good statistic for my 1995 standard edition Macintosh desktop computer. The internet browser doesn't support audio, and the download rate through the hardline is slower than my cell phone on the 3g. I surf the internet most of the day via my handheld, and have raced them several times.
I hope the day passes quickly, the paper gets sent early, and that I can make it home early enough in the afternoon that the world doesn't notice my absence from connectedness. I struggle inside my head about feeling disconnected most days, and today will be an extreme.

This head longs to soak up contact,
my heart longs to reminisce.
Hopefully someday soon,
I can quench the thirst within.
Battery powered cell-phone tower,
shooting words through night time skies.
Make me feel that transformant power,
make me feel alive.