Saturday, May 1, 2010

The Electronic Leash







It has recently come to my attention that you can have your own daughter chipped like a wayward terrier, and thus avoid all worry in life. The chipping can be done without surgery, since your daughter is never separated from her cell phone. It's called a Family Locator App and it's so accurate you can call in a missile strike on the little darling. How cool is that? I learned this through a TV ad in which a mother watches her teenage daughter recede into the distance down an escalator--now ten, now twenty feet away--in a shopping mall while a map floats over her head. The mother has the look of fondness and bitten-lip concern appropriate to a woman watching her only child board the Mayflower on the way to the New World. How much calmer would our old-world matron have been if, at any time, she could have ascertained her daughter's whereabouts within inches! "Forsooth, she's leaving the Macy's perfume counter," our bereft mother would report, "and heading over to Cinnabon."

It's hard to imagine our modern mother getting much of anything done with this much technology at her disposal. Already she can't go fifteen minutes without checking Facebook to find out if Lulu is still grumpy and needs coffee, or if Ryan has decided to get his tires rotated after all. Tracking one's own progeny as well would seem to be a full-time occupation. When we took our cat Larry in for radiation treatments and could go online to watch the Cat-Cam focused on her kennel, that's all we did. "Still asleep," we'd report to each other, several times an hour. It's not healthy.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these new abilities actually increase worry. I'm certain it would have taken years off my own mother's life if she had been able to know where I was all the time. Secrecy and deception, done right, can be loving gestures.

Dave and I are still phoneless and quite comfortable being lost. Even in the grocery store, I can't call him in Dairy to tell him I'm in the meat aisle. We have no idea where the other is unless we run into each other. People don't know how we can stand it, but we're used to it. Believe it or not, that's the way it was for everybody not all that long ago. There are some benefits to getting lost. We'd have never seen the entire north half of Vancouver Island if it were not for Dave and his remarkably inventive sense of direction.

No one else really knows where we are at any given time either. It's like we're invisible. I do recognize that this is an illusion. In reality, we're living in a world where scientists are able to track penguin populations by seeing their rust-colored poop on the snow from space. So finding me should be a snap.

I'm always leaving my shit all over the place.

16 comments:

  1. Yes, do I really want to know what my kids are doing all the time? I DO not!

    You all can think of yourselves as modern pioneers seeking new worlds "off the grid." Lostness = freedom is not a new concept. Of course our frontiers have now shrunk to the size of a microchip!

    I always enjoy reading your commentaries on life today and need the belly laughs that inevitably ensue!

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  2. We have a cell phone that costs $10/month, and we can accumulate unused funds. We're up to ~$250 now. We seldom use the thing, but it's nice to have for emergencies although we never seem to have emergencies. Sometimes, Cuppa makes me take it with me when I go out, but I do have a sort of aversion to it and am thankful when I can leave it in my pocket.

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  3. I was standing in Borders perusing all the non-literature when a fellow nearby started talking. "Excuse me?" I said politely, only to realize he was talking on his phone. And in the usual way: loudly.

    That's when I go into my Robert DeNiro Taxi Driver mode: "Are you talking to ME?" "Are you TALKING to me?" "Are you TALKING to ME?"

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  4. I love my cell phone and my daughter's cell phone. I have found the more I "track her down" the more uptight I get so I stopped. Now I say, call me when you get there, just like I would if she didn't have the phone, sometimes she forgets, and I've lived through it.

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  5. I am also very skeptical of modern electronic leashes. You should see what they've done to Washington DC bureaucracies (or probably all bureaucracies for that matter). EVERYONE is expected to be reachable and on call ALL THE TIME. So, how does anyone ever learn to handle stuff when the boss is away? THEY DON'T, because the boss is never away. When I was a senior officer in the Navy, I actually refused to have a Blackberry, but I'm afraid that wouldn't stand today.

    Ahem. Sorry for the rant. You obviously hit a cord.

    I do have a cell phone for traveling, and it's convenient. And I still get kind of a kick out of talking to someone thousands of miles away while traveling along at 70+ mph (very safely and hands free, of course). At least I've gotten over the, "Do you know where I am? You'll never guess!" phase.

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  6. I see we have a bit in common. Yeah, I have a cell phone -- somewhere. In fact, I need to find it and charge it so we can carry it with us as we travel too many miles to visit my daughter. Heaven forbid that someone call us on it....that would be panic time....I'm not sure what I have to do to answer it.

    Invisible. I like the concept. I want to be that way. This little ole' computer is as connected as I want to be. No Facebook, Twitter or any of that other junk. I love people....at shouting distance.

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  7. What I want to track down is a phone service like Anvilcloud's. I use mine on the road if I'm lost--if I remember to charge it--and for the occasional writers' class via telephone; but I can't get motivated to learn how to get messages, so don't call me unless you want to keep trying.

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  8. While I certainly sweated it out if my daughter was out later than expected and didn't call to check in (she always did, eventually), I think I would have freaked out more if she had had a cell phone but I couldn't reach her because she had it turned off, or the battery was dead, or whatever. Parents, stop the hovering!

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  9. It's too late to use that technology on my daughters but it did get me wondering if there was some way I could "chip" my wife? Maybe something that would send me a text message each time she uses the credit card.

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  10. I have no daughters or sons and my cat has no cell phone, but since he's an inny/outty, and I used to live in SoCal where coyotes are a way of life, I am rather compulsive about making sure I know he's close by when he's outside. I'm noisy in this pursuit, especially if he's reluctant to show himself.

    For humans, though, my only form of phone communication is a cell phone, no home or work land line, just my cell.

    Glad you're home safely from your trip, Murr. Welcome back!

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  11. My children have reached the age at which I am wondering when they will be moving the hell out. Actually, daughter and her fiance just purchased a house of their own. Of course, it's 100 feet away from my house. I'm not sure that's far enough.

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  12. It's not far enough. You can still see what they're doing from there. Gaaah!

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  13. "Secrecy and deception, done right, can be loving gestures."

    Indeed.

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  14. "Secrecy and deception, done right, can be loving gestures."

    Indeed.

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  15. While I certainly sweated it out if my daughter was out later than expected and didn't call to check in (she always did, eventually), I think I would have freaked out more if she had had a cell phone but I couldn't reach her because she had it turned off, or the battery was dead, or whatever. Parents, stop the hovering!

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