An Old School Rant

Recently I was in midtown Manhattan for a meeting. It was about 2 pm on a Thursday in August, and the week's car exhaust had built up in the humid air. I was wearing a suit. I stepped out of the heavily air conditioned office building and onto sweltering 5th Avenue, and reached into my pocket to call BrooklynLady. No cell phone! I had forgotten it. I remember thinking "How quaint, how retro. I'm going to use a public telephone to call my wife." So I stepped into one of those familiar but forgotten metal booths, picked up a payphone, and brought it to my ear.

Those of you who are New Yorkers, you probably already know how this ends. How could I have been so careless? Everyone has a cell phone today, most have black, blue, or pink berries, or iPhones. Who still uses pay phones? Wack-jobs, that's who. And without so much as glancing at the receiver, I pressed it against my ear?!? The earpiece was coated with a thick layer of what I am choosing to believe was Vaseline. My ear, my hair, the back of my hand, all quickly covered in this mystery-gunk. And I had 45 minutes on the subway before I could really clean up. My first time as "that guy" on the train who looks as if he'll explode if you so much as bump his bag.

All of the tests came back negative - I am completely fine. Emotionally bruised, but physically fine. After I stopped hating New York, I realized that it was my own fault - I forgot my cell phone and then ignored basic safety precautions when using the payphone. I realized that it is actually cell phones and all related gear that I hate. And I really do hate them. People walk down the street now, their faced buried in their phone gadgets. Kids on the subway play games on these things constantly, the incessant beeping polluting the air with noise. People seem to have forgotten how to be wherever they are, with whomever they're with. There is always a text message to send or a quick email to read, even at the dinner table.

Maybe I hated cellphones most at that moment because I realized that if we didn't have cellphones, people would still use payphones and there wouldn't be mystery gunk coating the earpieces.

Can you remember life before the cellphone? We all survived, somehow. I'm not denying that cellphones and other communication gadetry have made life better and safer for people. But when people don't have any self control, when they forget simple social etiquette, when they forget how to interact with other people, we all lose because of these gadgets. The funniest part is that blackberries and their ilk were supposed to make work easier, supposed to make us more efficient. Instead they've simply put us in the position of being on-call at all times, requiring us to respond instantly, eliminating the separation between work life and private life.

If I could, I would live without my cellphone, keep things totally old school. But that's simply not practical. I would lose business, and because everyone else now lives with the immediacy of the cellphone, I would be the one missing out. And actually, I like the way I use my cellphone. I just wish everyone were more like me. I keep it set on vibrate - that annoying ringing you hear everywhere, those personalized songs emitting from people's bags - that will never be from me.

It's hard to be old school these days. You have to go with the flow, or you get left behind. Thank goodness for wine, because I can be as old school as I like there. Keep your micro-oxidated, enzymatically enhanced, iPhone wines. Not because there is something wrong with those wines in an absolute sense - there isn't. But that stuff isn't for me. I'm sticking with the basics - climate and grapes and clean vats and know-how, I'm not falling behind anyone else by doing so. In fact, I think I'm doing fine. I'll keep my Puffeney, my Chandon de Briailles, my Coudert, and my Huet, thank you. And next time I'll remember to examine the earpiece before actually touching it.

Okay, this little rant is over.........now. You may go back to your text messaging and iPhone app downloading. I'm going to cutecellphonecases.com to buy one of those carrying cases for my cellphone so I never forget it again, ever.