Nov 17, 2010
Remember those days of carefree indulgence back in college or school or even the womb? You could do whatever you wished without anyone bothering you or asking you irritating questions. Life was so beautiful, with little misery to discover and a lot of fun to explore. Then, some idiot went and invented the mobile phone.
It’s bad enough to have one phone, but when you try to adhere to statistics (India has almost a 200% cell-phone penetration), you get stuck with two phones and a very short fuse. Constantly trying to please every one of the 900-odd contacts on both phones, most of whom just give you a missed call hoping you consider them important enough for you to call back, can be quite a challenge if you’re not taking anger management classes.
When I have full credit balance, the mobile battery is low. When the battery is fully charged, the credit balance is low. When battery and balance are fully available, mobile network is down….
Outgoing calls are less and incoming sales calls are a lot. Sales companies pester you with calls and when you lose your cool, you are expected to talk with respect and manners. I’ve always wondered the concept before/during the call that says “Kindly note, your call may be recorded or monitored for quality and training purposes”. I had my own version of the same when some sales person called me, “Kindly note, your call may be abused or cut for mental quality and gaining purposes.”
Cell phone has become very common nowadays - almost everyone has it. You may know that cell phone also creates radiation when it is in use. This radiation will harm our health especially our brain when we hold the cell phone close to the ear. And if you’re saved by its radiation, the ring tone will kill you.
Imagine a scenario during a serious office meeting. Everybody is pretending to be attentive, the mood is tense and then suddenly a mobile rings, “Last Christmas” by George Micheal. This is indeed what happened in one of our meetings. Unfortunately the guy whose mobile rang had to spend the next Christmas at home.
One morning, I had the (mis)fortune of running out of balance on my prepaid number and reached the end of the month’s grace period on my postpaid one, and at 9 in the morning, I was ‘temporarily disconnected’ from the entire world. It was such a beautiful feeling – I became nostalgic and went up on the terrace, placed both my phones in front of me and danced around in my shorts singing ‘It’s My Life’ and screaming,
“You can’t ring and ruin my life!
You can’t ring and ruin my life!
I control you!
Tra-la-la-laaa….
You can’t ring… You can’t ruin my life…”
Just as the chorus built up a bit and I became more and more animated, one of the phones beeped. I stopped mid-sentence, “I contr...” and stared at the pair of life-ruiners in front of me. One of them definitely had beeped. Was I dreaming? I went closer, slowly, hesitantly, and saw that my Motorola phone was flashing “1 New Message”.
How could this be? I knew for a fact that there was no balance in either of the phones. I couldn’t receive messages! This was not possible! Then, it struck me that if this phone could receive messages, then what’s stopping it from ringing! I let out a guttural scream of pain, grabbed both the phones and ran inside. When I flipped the phone open, the message was from my boss and it read, “Robin, can’t reach you. Please call.”
I felt like a moron as I stood in line a few hours later, trying to recharge both the phones.
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