Going Immobile

alt Could you go without your mobile phone for a month?

PETER MUNRO

THERE is a strange patch of people who still don't own a mobile phone, apparently. I imagine them to be either senile or properly smug about how very special they are, like vegans.

It's an easy target for scorn, that dead weight in the pocket slow roasting my testicles and dripping cancers and Justin Bieber ringtones into my brain. Waiting for the morning train, near a guy whose mobile phone rings like an air raid siren, it feels good to imagine him gone.

So I volunteered to be rid of my mobile phone for a month, not least to show how easily I could do without it. I dropped it in my bottom drawer and walked about for a while feeling mighty, ''stationary'' and free. Look at all those drones, I scoffed, talking, texting, furiously fumbling about oversized handbags to catch that all-important emoticon.

Once disconnected, you soon realise how silly it looks, this intelligent species subjugated by a vibrating little box. ''Answer me!'' it screams and so you do, no matter where you are (in bed/on the train/Frankston) or what you are doing (in a meeting, in an elevator, breaking up with my wife, can I call you back?).

The problem with mobile phones, it's said, is you are always available, always on. But it's worse than that. You start to see your mobile as a service to others and don't switch off, lest someone might need you at 3am, or in the toilet. In truth, you're not that important. Well, I'm not that important, at least.

Absent my mobile phone, I felt a little lighter. I read books on the train, rather than checked text messages. Or I just sat still, unplugged, rubbing fists-full of serenity all over myself. I felt a little bit bored and a little bit wonderful. Each time a mobile phone rang, I tutted sanctimoniously at the poor serf sweating over the handset.

I spent my first week apologising to people for not having a mobile. By week two, I was boasting about it. No longer was I a wanker with a mobile phone - now I was just a wanker. But by week three, I missed my appendage like crazy. My mobile phone is also my watch, calendar, personal organiser, alarm clock, email, street directory and memory. You can't expect to give that up without consequences, from mild irritations to sheer horror. After interviewing a federal politician, I had to ask to use his home phone to call a taxi. Another time I was left stranded in Werribee, thinking how no job was worth this hell.

Working from home one day, I phoned the office from my landline, checking that no one had been calling my mobile because they needed me (they hadn't and they didn't). My mood slipped from anxious thoughts about who might be trying to call to despondency over who wasn't.

At times I felt disconnected and alone. I stood close to strangers at traffic lights, listening in to dribbles of chatter just to feel part of the conversation.

I managed without my mobile, of course. There's the work phone and home phone, email, carrier pigeon. I started wearing a watch and using the phone book as something other than a blunt weapon. I had to learn how to be punctual, after almost missing an ice-cream date because I was 10 minutes late.

I realised my mobile let me be lazy, ill-disciplined, fuzzy. So long as I called to say ''I won't be on time'', I never had to be. Life ran like a Metro train timetable.

My worst day came when trying to find a friend on a crowded street. After 10 minutes screaming his name to the birds, I scrounged 50 cents and used a grotty public phone to call his mobile. There is a reason people don't use public phonebooths any more. They are dark, festy spaces, rife with disease. They see their end of days and are going out in a blaze of bacteria.

But what I missed most was the spontaneity of the mobile phone. Walking in the city one morning, I was seized by the sudden desire to tell my wife I love her. But I was not near a phone and the moment passed. The counterpoint to stepping outside the 24/7 circle of communication is that other people are no longer as accessible to you, either.

Thirty days after I'd dropped my mobile phone in the drawer, I turned it back on. There was the welcome screen and annoying ringtone. There was a text from a friend, wondering why I hadn't replied to her texts. There was a note from my aunt, saying my grandfather was out of surgery and was in good spirits.

And there we all were, back together again.

Source: www.the age.com.au