No-mo-pho-bia – noun : an exaggerated, inexplicable, and illogical fear being without a mobile device, power source, or service area.
This week Danita had an experience of this.
Danita is a very smart, intelligent and cluey lady with many talents and great attributes (hey – she chose to be with me so that proves it, right).
Only 3% of Australian business women have operated businesses with a turnover in excess of $1M – Danita is in that 3%.
Unfortunately, patience isn’t one of her strengths.
For some time her phone has been doing some very odd things.
Recently, my phone rang and it was her phone calling.
I say “her phone” because it was in another room, by itself, connected to a charger, when it spontaneously decided to ring my phone.
It’d be an interesting article if I anthropormorphicised (is there such a word?) her phone and imagined it with a mind of it’s own but that’s nightmare stuff, so we won’t go there.
This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened but she’d previously excused them as normal “handbag” or “pocket” calls – you know the time your phone rang your boss while it was in your pocket and you just happened to be complaining about how incompetent they were – that type of situation.
However, this clearly couldn’t be explained away by such a thing and so she decided it was time to take action.
That meant doing a reset of the phone – not just restarting (been there, done that multiple times) but doing a factory reset.
This isn’t something that should be done lightly and so it had been discussed as an option for some time before being acted upon.
Finally, out of angst and frustration she pressed the button.
Having reset the phone the fun part (not!) was to recreate how it had been – this time without the ghost in the machine.
We have HTCs and it seems that since we purchased the phones originally HTC has created some new web-based presence which requires signing up for an account in order to set up your phone.
This is useful in that you can backup the contents to the web and transfer them to another phone or re-create the current one and other really handy stuff.
However, it also means there’s yet ANOTHER account you need to keep track of login details.
It took a while to get past that and to be able to recreate the email and contacts setup.
We’ve now become very dependent on instantaneous connection and when we have to wait for anything it can get very frustrating.
Problem was – the resyncing of the contacts takes a while.
I did mention that patience isn’t one of Danita’s finer points and so this was very nerve-wracking.
Firstly, people she expected to be on her list weren’t there.
Then, they turned up but only their email addresses (where’s the phone number?).
Finally, after a LLLLOOOOONNNNNGGGGG time her Contacts and emails had re-established themselves and there was a HUGE sign of relief.
While all this was going on there was a fair bit of rather loud and somewhat abusive comments to the phone about how things SHOULD be working.
I decided this was a good time to keep out of the way and justified myself with the reasoning that she is a very capable person (mentioned above) and didn’t need me to rescue her, thus establishing the VICTIM -> RESCUER relationship (so that’ my excuse and I’m sticking with it).
Eventually, things returned to normal, the apps she was so reliant on reappeared and she was able to start working again.
What this episode highlighted for us was how dependent we are on these devices.
What started out as a phone, a way to keep in touch with other people, has become the controller of our lives.
It has our calendar and so controls where and when we do anything.
One of its apps tells us the weather so we can make decisions and what we’re going to wear when we do manage to get out (whatever happened to looking out the window?).
It tells us what’s on TV, what’s at the movies, whether the restaurant we ‘re planning to go to is any good and seems to be insidiously integrated into every part of our daily lives and relationships with other people.
And then to top it all off it keeps popping up with the latest facebook posts to make sure we never put it down.
I even have an app on my computer, from the Chiropractic Association, which tells me to get up every 20 minutes and go for a walk around the office.
What was once the servant has become the master.
All this was brought home to us when Danita didn’t have access to what she expected.
It gave us a little taste of nomophobia.
Here’s the result of a survey (where do you fit?):
Try this test to see how see how nomophobic you are:
How did you score?
My computer has just told me it’s time to get up so I’d better do as I’ve be directed.
Enjoy your week and, as it says on the back on the bus “Keep your hands off it”.