My phone, "The Brick"

Several weeks ago, when we asked Tim what we should give him for his birthday, he said he’d like a new phone. He’d had his current phone for a year; it was a hand-me-down from me the last time I upgraded. Unlike many parents of middle schoolers, for whom outfitting their pre-teen with a phone is a soul-searching decision, it wasn’t much of an issue for us. Tim really wasn’t that interested in deploying telecommunications; but since he sometimes walks home from school, sometimes rides his bike, and sometimes takes the bus, I thought it would be convenient if he could easily be in touch and let me know what he was doing. I knew he wasn’t interested in spending a lot of time talking to his friends.

So we were curious why he wanted a different phone at this point. He told Rick it was a cause for teasing. “My friends call it ‘The Brick,’” he said.

This seemed implausible to me because Tim’s friends just aren’t the type to tease, moreover, he’s not the type to have a problem with teasing. Unlike some of my friends’ kids who are the same age, Tim’s not particularly concerned with how he fits in or what other kids think of him. Perversely, of course, that means he fits in just fine and other kids get along easily with him. Plus he has that inexplicable and yet timeless advantage of being an athlete. Boys who are known for being good at sports are almost never subjected to teasing, according to a report I read not long ago, and Tim’s experience tends to bear that out.

Later, when we pursued the question again, he downplayed it. “It wasn’t really teasing,” he admitted. “Austin called it ‘The Brick’ maybe one time.” Really, he confessed, he just wanted a phone on which he could send text messages.

Because it wasn’t a convenient time in our phone contract to buy him a new phone, I offered to trade with him. My phone is nothing fancy, but it’s a very slim flip-phone with more features, including a screen that would make texting easy, so we also bought him a texting plan. All we needed to do was switch the SIM cards so that we wouldn’t have to change phone numbers and we were all set.

And so I ended up with the phone they call The Brick, and although I was a little bit grudging about the sacrifice, it turns out I actually like it. Understand, we’re not talking about the first generation of cell phones here. This isn’t like carrying around a cordless in my purse. In reality, The Brick was probably one of the last models made before the advent of flip phones. It’s not all that big and bulky; it’s just…thick and oblong.

And that’s actually an advantage to me, because the slim black flip-phone was always disappearing in my purses and bags. It would slide into a crevice and camouflage against the black interior; I wouldn’t be able to locate it even when it was ringing. With The Brick, this isn’t a problem. It sits stolidly in my purse like a chunk of ice, its lighter gray sheen easy to see against the purse’s dark lining, its moderate heft easy for my fingers to locate.

I’m fine with its lack of fancy features, too. Yesterday when it started tinkling that old familiar Nokia trademark ring, a friend I was walking with said “Oh, how European!” More like “Oh, how two thousand,” I thought to myself; she was clearly reacting to the fact that I didn’t have a clever sound effect or popular song for my ringtone the way most phones purchased in the past five years or so do. The Brick doesn’t offer a lot of choices, though, and the default ring sounds fine to me.

The Brick doesn’t have an interactive screen. I can’t surf the web or access my email with it. I can make phone calls. That’s all I really want to be able to do with my phone. While everyone else wanders around lost in the distraction of apps, tricks, games and features, I don’t think about my phone much unless it rings. Phones the way phones used to be, you could say.

In general, I tend to be attracted to gadgets and new accessories, but this time is different. When I want to make a call, I know how to do it. I have other gadgets that can take pictures, play music, display email and shoot video. I’m fine with The Brick, a simple, straightforward and solid piece of electronica that can do what I need it to do. And until I decide I need to hear a Van Morrison tune every time I get a phone call, I’ll stick with it.

How unplugged should vacation be?

It was only slightly coincidental that I was flying home from a vacation in Colorado when I read this article from Monday’s New York Times about scientists spending time “unplugged” while debating about whether an actual change in mental facilities occurs when we remove ourselves from the world of connectivity. I say “slightly” because you don’t have to be a professional journalist to recognize there’s a reason this story ran when it did: many Americans, not just me and the scientists in the story, take vacation this month, so the question about the value of separating from technology while on vacation is particularly timely.

Nonetheless, I’d already been thinking about the issue of how far to remove myself from connectivity – email, social media, cell phone calls – throughout the vacation, so it was interesting to be flying home as I read this story, in which some scientists expressed their belief that it makes a huge difference in our powers of focus and mental acuity when we disconnect in this way and other scientists said the difference was incidental.

I’m different from a lot of the people I often read about in regards to this topic in a very simple way: at least by telecommunication standards, I’m not that popular. I don’t receive hundreds of emails a day. My cell phone seldom rings more than once or twice in any twenty-four hour period, and even when it rang during our Colorado vacation, the caller was usually a local friend trying to find out what time I wanted to meet for coffee rather than anyone related to my work. I might like to be one of those typical professionals who acts vexed over the onslaught of calls and messages that are part of the daily fabric, but that’s not really my situation.

Nonetheless, I do appreciate the value of stepping away from the constant contact we have come to expect in everyday life. While in Colorado, I reminded myself that checking email once or twice a day was enough; I didn’t need to distract myself with cyber-discussions about what time the Spaghetti Supper Committee should meet in September. The Twitter feed is always tempting, but I reminded myself that focusing on our vacation plans mattered more while we were away from home than keeping up with constant news updates or pithy observations about the challenges of the writing life. Same with Facebook: I was in Colorado to spend time with my husband and children, and I knew I needed to detach myself from the stream of stories, anecdotes and observations of my friends back home and my high school contacts.

But I wasn’t so sure about the daily newspaper. Should I be keeping up with the Boston Globe online, I wondered? And if so, was it enough to read breaking news, or should I browse through features and editorials as well? Was it okay to say that since I was away from home I could skip the obituaries, or did I dare not take the risk that information I should know would appear in that section during the week?

Phone calls were less of an issue. As I said, my cell phone doesn’t ring that often, and my Globe editors already knew I was on vacation. The only person I really wanted to hear from (given that my parents and sisters aren’t big cell phone users either) was my literary agent with news of a publishing deal, but I hardly expected that call to come through during my eight days in Colorado, and my instincts were right: it didn’t.

Vacation or not, finding ways to routinely detach ourselves from the steady stream of conversation and information that has come to define this era is always a good idea. Earlier this year I heard several interviews with Judith Shulevitz about her new book on keeping the Sabbath, and that inspired me to try to go email-free on Sundays. Though I don’t always stick to it, I try to check email only first thing in the morning and after dinner on Sundays, and stay away from the keyboard the rest of the day.

Moreover, keeping myself off line for hours at a time during our vacation cemented my resolve not to start using a smartphone. I’d been on the fence for a while about whether I wanted that level of mobile communication. Right now I have to be at my computer to check my email, and had been vacillating about whether I’d like the kind of phone that would enable me to carry email access around with me.

Now, I’ve convinced myself that this is not something I want. I don’t like the idea of constantly checking email. It’s not just the issue of distraction: I like surprises. I’m resigned to the fact that opening our “real” post office box is no longer very interesting since hardly anything exciting or unexpected comes by snail-mail, but checking my email after several hours away from my computer can still be a small thrill. With ten or more new messages, who knows what treasures lurk? A chatty note from my college roommate? A compliment on my blog? Word from my agent about finding a publisher? (Nope, not yet.)

I agree with the scientists in the New York Times article who believe concentration is improved when we walk away from our mobile communications. I just have trouble doing it for more than a few hours at a time. But I admit that there was a sense of liberation last week as I hit the hiking trail and discovered I had no signal, or closed my cell phone in a locker before following my kids down the hall to the public pool. Sometimes it’s good to just walk away and concentrate on the life that’s unfolding right in front of you instead of in your various virtual realms. And it’s even more helpful to reconnect afterwards and acknowledge that most likely, you really haven’t missed a thing.

Tim telecommunicates

You know those times when a name pops up in the “from” column of your e-mail directory that makes you do a double-take? That happened to me yesterday. It wasn’t the name of a high school nemesis or a long-forgotten co-worker. It was my son Tim.

An e-mail from Tim? I thought to myself. It didn’t quite compute. I was at my desk beginning the last hour of my workday, and Tim was at school. Sure, I knew he had the capability of sending me e-mail; I was the one who had set up his account, just last weekend. I wasn’t really thinking at the time about how he would use it: mostly to send notes to his close friend who goes to a different school, I figured.

It didn’t occur to me that he might write to me. But when I opened the e-mail, I realized he had just gotten out of school for the day and was writing to me from the public library, his usual afterschool destination, to confirm with me what time I would pick him up there. How convenient, I thought. In the past, we’ve always had to finalize a pickup plan before he leaves for the bus at 7:30 in the morning. Now I was free to alter the plan just thirty minutes out, because Tim happened to be on e-mail and happened to have written to me.

We’re behind most families we know in terms of telecommunications and children. Most of Tim’s classmates have not only e-mail accounts but also cell phones, text-messaging capability and Facebook status. Last week when there were no computers available at the library for afterschool research, he and a friend pulled up Wikipedia on his friend’s iTouch. They’re all light years ahead of us. I’m still accustomed to making plans with Tim the old-fashioned way: deciding first thing in the morning when and where I’ll pick him up, and making it clear that he’d better be there.

But now he has e-mail, and in the very near future he’s likely to get his first cell phone, only because my husband needs an upgrade so probably each one of us will move one step up (I’ll get Rick’s outgrown one, which has advantages over mine in that it’s a flip phone and takes pictures, and Tim will get mine). This won’t exactly open up a world of technology to him: I have what I call the old-fashioned kind of cell phone, meaning all it does is make calls, and even those we pay 25 cents a minute for. Texting, not to mention the newer variations thereupon, won’t be an issue with my clunky old circa 2002 Nokia.

Objectively, it makes sense to me for Tim to have his own phone at this point. Like a lot of kids in our town, he likes to go to the library after school dismissal: he does his homework (that’s the rule if he’s not going to come straight home), then plays computer games for a little while and, as of yesterday, apparently checks his e-mail. I generally swing by to pick him up at the library an hour or so after school dismissal. It’s a casual plan that has worked well for the first two months of school.

Still, it will be a little easier once we can reach each other by phone to change or confirm pickup times. But I worry a little bit, with the phone and even the e-mail, that once I have the capability to track him down electronically, it will just become a problem for me when I can’t. If I rely on him to check his e-mail after school for changes in the pick-up plan, what if one day he doesn’t happen to want to check e-mail? As for the phone, I’ve reminded him several times that ringing cell phones are forbidden at both the library and at school, which means he’ll never embarrass himself by having it go off when it’s not supposed to, but it also means he’ll end up using it only when he wishes to turn it on. I can leave him a voicemail…but will he remember, or care, to check voicemail?

There’s no question that enhanced means of communication with Tim will be both an advantage and a disadvantage. During mild weather, he rides his bike to school and home. That’s definitely a situation in which I’ll feel a little better if he has a phone. But I can’t help thinking that providing ourselves with more agents of communication means simultaneously opening up the possibility of less communication, or at least proportionately less given the possibilities that will exist. What if I e-mail him, call him, and voicemail him – and he doesn’t respond? Won’t that leave me a lot more worried than if I didn’t have any way to get in touch in the first place?

We’ll get used to it, I’m sure. We’ll figure it out. Every other family does. But it’s still new to us, and I have no doubt it will take us some time to work out the details.