February 26, 2007
Seventeen years ago, I got my first cell phone.
I resisted it for years. I was in sales and had to travel, but I believed that there was such a thing as being too connected, and at that point in time, mobile phones were expensive, inconsistent, weighed as much as the bricks that they looked like, and were just about as easy to handle. But as I inherited larger customers I found it necessary to succumb, and thus began my love/hate relationship with cellular phones.
Lately I've been trying to take more care about using my phone in the car. I've noted the studies that claim that using one while driving – even with a hand's free feature – means that you are not paying strict attention to the act of piloting the car, thus threatening your safety and the safety of all the lane-changing, speeding, mouth-breathing road hogs around you.
This fact makes me wonder just how safe it is to drive in a car with bickering siblings, fast food on your lap, or an untethered Ornamental Yippy Dog, but this is Cellphone Safety that we're talking about here today, so these other harmful possibilities will have to be left to the ever-vigilant government Studies of Things That Everybody With Half A Freaking Brain Should Know Already Department.
I was using a hands-free feature when my cellphone attacked. This consists of a wire that plugs into the phone and ends with an ear bud. A quarter of the way down the length of the wire is a small microphone and then further down the wire is a clip, and when I use the phone in the car, I adhere that clip to the seat belt that goes across my chest so that the microphone stays near my mouth.
As I drove along one day, I turned my head to look out the window and the clip popped off the seatbelt and transferred itself to my neck, where its sharp little jaws bit into my tender flesh.
I howled and grabbed at it, swerving across three lanes as I did so, and I had the fleeting thought as my life flashed before my eyes that it was pretty ironic that I was going to killed in an accident due to something billed as a safety feature. The cheap little clip was surprisingly tenacious, but I finally pulled it off and gained control of the vehicle. A glance in the rearview mirror (also sometimes dangerous, but at least I wasn't putting on mascara) showed that my neck was sporting an angry welt, and it left a reddish mark that lasted for a week, the closest thing I'd had to a hickey in about 25 years.
Now what's particularly pathetic about this is that it happened not just once, but four or five times before I finally decided that it was better for me not to use the clip feature at all. It was safer, I decided, to drive one-handed just like people pulling away from fast-food outlets or like soccer Moms trying to reach and separate kids fighting in the back seat.
Next up: My DVD player gave me an STD.
Comments
debster52 (anonymous) says...
I sent this to my dad..as he will remember some 35 years ago I used the excuse that I slipped on the uneven bars in P.E. class to explain my very first hickey...lol...too bad we didn't have cell phones then!!!
February 27, 2007 at 7:45 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
amazonratz (anonymous) says...
This is too hilarious! Great writing, and proof once again that those little buggers are dangerous when driving.
February 28, 2007 at 8:52 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
pdetmer (pdetmer) says...
I sent an e-mail to each of you through the Boomer Girl system, thanking you for your comments. Hope you got them. If you didn't ... well ... thanks for your comments!
March 29, 2007 at noon ( permalink | suggest removal )
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