The thing that annoys me, more than anything else, about cell phones, is the way that certain people seem to think that I should be always available. If they call, and I don’t answer, the message left is always petulant and irritated, as though by not answering the phone I have committed some kind of insult against them. Particularly if they call my home phone and my cell phone, and I answer neither, then the message is even more irritated.

I remember, not so many years ago, when you could safely take 12 hours to return a phone message, and nobody thought that you had been run over by a garbage truck. These days, if you wait more than 10 minutes to return a message, you get a lecture about how hard they’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Heaven forbid you should leave your phone home, or … *horrors* … turn it off.

I envy my friends who have decided not to have a cell phone, and I wish for a simpler time when I could make a similar decision. Instead of being a convenience, my cell phone is, primarily, something that I pay for so that people I don’t want to talk to can get in touch with me no matter where I am. I guess this is the price I pay for being a slave to technology.