walkingman

You can call me crazy. You can call me weird. But you cannot call me on the weekends or in the evenings. I am not a cell phone person. It is not my best friend. I do not carry it with me 24/7. I have a love/hate relationship with my cell phone. I love the convenience of a cell phone but I hate the convenience of having a cell phone. I do not want everyone reaching out and touching me all the time. There are times when I like quiet or solitude. During the work day I am constantly interrupted by phone calls, clients, appointments, and coworkers so sometimes it is difficult to write. When I get home I go into my home office, turn the stereo on low and just let the juices flow. Then the phone rings and it is someone calling with nothing important to say. I get sidetracked and have to waste time getting the focus back. We have a landline also which is hooked up to a fax and answering machine. If you call during dinner your call will go straight to the machine as we like to spend dinner at the kitchen table talking to each other. We can hear your message and if it is an emergency we can pick up the line but we have never in all these years ever had what could be termed an emergency come across the line during dinner. When I walk in the door from work I put the cell phone down in the den so if it goes off we will hear it but we do not rush to answer it. On the weekends if we are outside in the yard we will not hear it and that is okay. Why is there this rush for instantaneous communication? We have gone from the age of snail mail to email and faxes and now instant messaging and texts. My business still relies upon the written word. You can try and speed up the transmission of the words but you cannot force the human mind which creates the words to produce them faster. I sit down at the blank screen with my reference materials next to me and if I draw a blank there is nothing that can get those words flowing faster. Writers block is writers block. I love being able to call or text the wife and ask her if she needs anything from the store. She can text me her whole list and I do not have to remember whether she wants cherry, plum, or roma tomatoes. I do not like it when colleague texts me a contractual language change or rewrite change in texting abbreviations. And a phone call will not work either in this case. I need to see the exact wording in front of me to grasp the full meaning and context of the change. Do not misunderstand me though. I do talk on the phone. There are some days that I feel that it is attached permanently to my hand or ear and that all I have done for 8-10 hours is just talked. I have gone home many days with little or no voice left. Yet I still feel like a dinosaur, the cellphoneusernot. The strange thing is that I have willingly embraced all forms of modern technology except for the cell phone. You can reach out and touch me many ways but please call ahead and if you reach voice mail please leave a message. And if it is on the weekend or in the evening do not expect a call back until either Monday morning or the following morning.