You Know the Feeling

Last Friday morning: Wallet?... check, bag?... check, Keys?..... ok good. Phone???...... OH #$%&*#@! Yep that was me last week, After a U of T event the night before I had successfully misplaced my phone and couldn't figure out where I had put it. Now I'll admit that after a few late night beverages I don't have the best of memories, but I can't be the only one here who has misplaced a cellphone after a night out... hell I know I'm not the only one.  Just based on an article I dug up written by USA today, they posted some statistics earlier this year on how much money has been literally "lost" from the value of misplaced phones in the US from 2011. Can you guess how much it added up to? $30 billion worth! Now that means that population wise (assuming Canadians lose their phones as much as Americans) we lose about $3 billion worth of them each year too. See all the useless facts I can teach you! Anyways all that statistical analysis is besides the point (I'm a humanities student I don't even know what stats are anyways), what I really want to get at here is what I slave I am to my cellphone, which obviously means all of you U of T cell phone junkies are too. I kept digging in my pocket throughout the day looking for my phone, and realized how addicted I was to it, just the thought of having to socially interact with people scared me. What? I had to go out of my way to actually see my friends and family to speak with them?...UNACCEPTABLE! This simply isn't how we do things in the 21st century. Oh, also it made me realize how I know absolutely no ones numbers off by heart, including my families. Could you imagine living 30 years ago where you had to know all this stuff, and you had to use a landline telephone? Insanity if you ask me. Though if you think about it, if we all didn't have cellphones it would be pretty great as well. I mean not only would we no longer have to put up with people instagramming their breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but we also might actually see each other in person more. I mean imagine everyone always going to the same place to chill and socialize because we couldn't any other way, we would actually interact with each other more face to face instead of throwing everything into cyberspace. It would be like one of those cool 70's sitcoms where the high school/University students meet in some guys basement (wait, I'm just thinking of that 70's show, bad reference)... I know I just blew your mind there.

Fortunately for me a friend did find my phone later that day, but for a whole 12 hours (yes 12 whole hours) I was phone less and had this huge epiphany on how linked we are to our phones, and unfortunately it looks like things are getting worse too. Just the other day After picking up my eight year old brother at school I overheard a girl no older than ten in his schoolyard telling her friend how she "BBM'd her but got no response" and how she thinks she is being ignored. I mean come on, I still had a binder of Pokémon cards at that age, not a blackberry. Einstein summed it up pretty good if you ask me: "I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots" Yep I'm definitely an idiot, are you? Shak