Had a super stressful morning. The mobile phone wouldn’t switch on, for the fourth time. That feeling of being disconnected, unable to contact others. What to do? Why so much stress?
What might the world around us look like without looking over and around, or even through, a mobile phone?
Witchcraft
Managed to book an appointment at a store in the centre of Glasgow to get the phone looked at on Sunday for today – on the third occurrence of being locked out. Upon entering, I looked at the phone to find that…yet again..it had locked me out. The screen was black and no amount of jiggling, pressing a sequence of buttons or just starring at it would solve the problem.
I met up with my “genius” who calmly plugged in the phone to their laptop, managed to switch it on –
what is this witchcraft, this magic that the phone would obey their
instructions and not from their master?
The laptop purred as it examined the intricacies of the phone, and then it was revealed. A potential hardware failure, 7 times in the last 48 hours – and I had only seen it 3 times. It was worse than I had thought.
“We need to send this away to be rectified, it should be back with you in a week” was their response. “You can have a loaner”
The next 90 minutes was spent updating the ‘loaner’ phone to the latest OS version, and then restoring the cloud backup to the loaner phone. I could then leave 2 hours after entering, with a phone with my data on it (much of it was to finally be fully restored upon arriving home); but it posed a real question:
Why so much stress?
Reconnected
I have 8 email accounts, responsible for at least 3 FB pages, a website (not including this one) and a lot of my data – not accounting for the photo’s. If this phone were to get into the wrong hands, there is a lot of data which could be used – misused. But that wasn’t the issue… It was that feeling that I was in town and unable to contact someone. Gone are the red phone boxes on the street corner.
Connected but to whom?
Spiritually, we are always connected to God. There are no SIM cards needed, no wifi link to connect to, no password even. But mentally I felt someone wandering without that vital connection to home. Why so much stress?
Our lives are intrinsically connected to the ‘cloud’. The older generation, largely – as I can identify some in their late 90s who are very computer savvy – might struggle with using the internet and computers. The dexterity required to operate mobile phones is getting more precise.
Have you tried to get that smaller and smaller SIM card into the phone recently?
I am sitting at the University – there is wifi here 😉 The students are all sitting eating lunch but on their phones…whilst chatting. Nothing wrong with that; however, I wonder what might be the reaction if the internet were to go ‘down’? How might we buy anything? How would we get cash out of the bank machines? How might we use our bank cards to pay for objects? How might the students sitting around me access their lecture notes? How might we post an image of our lunch or cat on FB? 😉
Response?
I wonder, for my own mental health benefit, whether we might ‘fast’ from mobile technology, even for a few wee hours – and I am not talking overnight… What might that feel like?
What if we were to spend a little more time connected intentionally to God, however you see them? What might the world around us look like without looking over and around, or even through, a mobile phone?
Would there be so much stress?
I see the irony in what I’m about to write. There’s a free App called Chime which you can set the hours each day that it chimes on the hour (unless you’ve muted the iPhone); it’s a way to start thanking God for things, à la Frank Laubach 😊
Yes to thank God throughout the day might be better than just at the end of the day
I found the dialogue interesting and I enjoyed it