Severance

An exercise in inconvenience: If you ever want to alter your daily routine significantly, leave your cell phone at home. Go without it for just one workday. Even if you don't usually get that many calls or text messages during those hours, you'd be surprised how cut off from the world and vulnerable you can feel just because you don't have access to your phone. At least, that's how it was for me today.

For those of you who haven't yet joined the 21st century, please purchase a cellular phone as soon as possible. Do the rest of us a favor, buck tradition and cut the tether of the land line. You might not know this but all of your cell phone-having friends consider you a relic of the past. Like the vestigial wings on the kiwi, a person without a cell phone is a nonfunctional nub incapable of operating at the same level as his or her peers. Your deficiency in one of the most basic of human skills -- the ability to communicate -- makes you primitive. Accordingly, the rest of us look at you in the same manner that we might one of our ancient ancestors, like the Australopithecene: you are vaguely familiar because we see a reflection of our past in your visage, but the fundamental differences are obvious and impossible to ignore. Frankly, we'd rather not associate with your kind if we can help it; you make us uncomfortable.













What is most perplexing is that, unless there are monetary prohibitions, you are purposefully removing yourself from the realm of human interaction. Not only do you inconvenience yourself, but you also frustrate those of us who have grown accustomed to being connected at all times with the rest of society. Ask anyone who has ever had a pressing need to get a hold of you when you weren't at home whether that is true.

Like vegetarianism, anti-cell phone sentiment demands a substantial price be paid just to prove a point. Strident opposition to the cellular phone will virtually guarantee eternal solitude and depression-inducing loneliness. If that's not bad enough, you -- and your kind -- will surely become extinct, or at the very least obsolete, as progress brings those of us who harbor no fear of technology closer and closer together. You stand now at the point of no return. Do you really want to go the way of the cave man simply because of stubbornness?