Phone on your face
/Elysha was on the phone, talking to a storyteller when Charlie called from upstairs. We had put him to bed moments before, but he apparently needed something, so Elysha handed me the phone and asked to finish explaining our rehearsal process with the storyteller while she check on the boy.
I took her phone, placed it to my ear, and suddenly felt uncomfortable and stupid.
"This is so weird," I told the storyteller. "I'm pressing a phone against the side of my face. I can't believe that people still do this."
For years, I have been either:
- Avoiding phone calls altogether.
- Putting phone calls on speaker.
- Conversing via FaceTime or Skype.
- Most often, speaking to people on the phone via my bluetooth headphones.
Pressing a phone against the side of your face is weird. Perhaps in the days when phones were mounted to walls and were longer and more contoured for the face, this didn't feel so odd and limiting, but holding a small rectangle between your ear and mouth is bizarre.
I understand that I feel this way because I stopped doing it this way a long time ago, but nonetheless I'm here to tell you it's still weird and uncomfortable.
Objectively so. It's just an odd way for two humans to communicate.
Also, by using my headphones, I always have two hands free when talking on the phone. If I'm on a phone call that I expect to take a while (longer than a minute), I'm always doing something else: folding clothes, pulling weeds from the cracks of the driveway, picking up toys, cleaning out the refrigerator, or some other mindless, necessary chore.
I can't imagine losing the use of a hand in order to press glass to your cheek.
Happily, Elysha quickly returned and we placed the storyteller on speaker in order to listen to her story.
Crisis averted.
Well, maybe not a crisis, except when I think about all those millions of people in the world, pressing rectangles to their faces everyday when so many better options are available to them.