Apathy Jack writes:

For a while now, I’ve been the only person I know without a cell phone. I’ve always said I’d get one when I needed it, but I simply never have to date. My friends told me that I needed one in order to track down people with greater ease, and in order that they might track me down with equivalent ease. That was never the best argument to use, because the only idea more repugnant than being able to find the people I know wherever they roam is the truly horrible concept of them being able to do it to me.

The weird thing is how much pressure there has been on me to get one. I know a thing or two about being on the receiving end of peer pressure: I went through five years of high school without drinking, four years of university without experimenting with drugs, and four or so years of church without doing a single thing that could be described by even my most charitable supporters as being in any way Christian whatsoever. The flack I copped for all of those combined in no way even approaches the pressure put on me by my friends to get a cellphone.

However, I now have a cellphone.

It wasn’t my idea: My school is upgrading, and all of the teachers now have them as part of a centralised attendance monitoring system – it’s far too complicated to go into detail about...

So anyway, today I lost my pen, and decided to make a note to myself in the form of a text-message – My first ever text-message to be precise.

Now, near as I can tell, this text-messaging that all of my friends have been evangelising to me for years with more passion and fervour than Creflo Dollar at a Benny Hinn event, is, basically, a slower, more fidgety, more irritating version of sending an email.

Now, if all of the cell phone preachers out there had begun your many sermons to me over the years with “C’mon, it’s just like technology you already have, only it takes longer and is considerably more annoying!” then I could have at least discarded your deranged ramblings sooner...


In other news, when I unfurled the local rag today, and saw that the headline ‘Children Traumatised’ had nothing to do with my school, I audibly sighed with relief. I wonder if teachers at other schools have that sort of problem.

Actually, given that I never see their schools mentioned by name in article after article on Auckland’s ever growing youth gang problem, I don’t wonder at all.


(Oh, and to pre-empt this: No, People-I-Know, you can’t have my cell phone number. Because I don’t know it, that’s why not. And because it’s still locked to prevent outside-school use. And because I don’t want you people bothering me - If I did, I would have got a cell phone years ago.)