The Gym Sans Cellphone

Like yours, my smartphone is so much more than  a telephone. It’s where I check Facebook, Instagram,  my email, the weather, and the stock market. If I’m not listening to the radio, Spotify provides the rest of my music. Its GPS is indispensable. It’s where I read the national news.  When I travel by air, I use the app to track my flight (is it on time? Which gate and is it still at the same gate? Estimated time of departure). And I'm just getting started.  If that is not enough uses for this little black box, what about Google? Once years ago I started a sentence with “I wonder…” and my 20 something son said, “Dad, you have a smartphone. You don’t have to wonder about anything.”  But when I leave it at home, like I did a couple of hours ago, of all of its uses,  it became just a telephone.

If you’re older than 65, like me, you remember when  a cellphone was just a telephone. The phone itself was as big as a brick and weighed about as much too. Service was spotty at best. If I was in a city or close to an interstate, I had pretty good service. Other than that, not so much. So today I got everything together to go to the gym. Car keys, wallet, lock, headphones. I’m ready to go. At the gym as I was putting everything in the locker, I realized that I didn’t have my smartphone. Only in this case, its absence was just a phone. I began to run all sorts of awful scenarios in my mind. “What if my wife needs me and can’t find me? She doesn’t even know I’m at the gym.” “What if anybody else needs me and can’t find me?” “What if I have a flat tire on the way home?” “Or my car breaks down? Do people still actually  stop to help someone who’s stranded?”  “Or what if  I have an accident?” ”What if I get in a traffic jam?”  “What if…?”  “What if…?”  “What if…?”

“Ok” I said to myself. “Probably none of these things is going to happen. And if it does happen, I probably will eventually find my way home and not die of starvation or exposure. My wife can probably survive without me for an hour or so”. I also found comfort in the fact that I was, after all,  less than five miles from home.

As it turned out, the gym music was fairly sedate and I got along just fine without Spotify. On the way home, I didn’t have a flat tire; I didn’t break down. I didn’t have an accident; I didn’t get in a traffic jam. It took me less than 15 minutes to get home. Nothing bad happened and I had no need for a telephone. When I got home, I immediately found my smartphone and checked for missed calls and texts, and there were none. Nobody had looked for me or missed me. It's all good.

So what have I learned from all this? Absolutely nothing. The next time I'm away from home without my smartphone, it will be as bad or worse.