It was in the ladies room of one of those restaurants that have a major bar scene, and a woman was on her cell phone. Her voice was a little slurry from too many cosmopolitans or Bud Lights, and she was clearly talking to her husband or boyfriend on his cell phone at some other bar. "You're not still drinking, are you? You'd better not get drunk ... "
She kept getting angrier, and it occurred to me, here's another effect of the advances in telephone technology on human relations.
When phones stayed in one place, before they became mobile, a guy could go to a bar, and if his wife called him there, the bartender would glance over at the guy shaking his head and tell her, nope, he wasn't there.
The bar was a place to escape. So was work, unless you worked in an office and didn't have a secretary to tell your wife you weren't in.
No more. No occupation, except maybe deep-sea diving and Lasik surgery, and I wouldn't vouch for the latter, renders you unreachable by cell phone.
On the way to the airport, our taxi driver was talking frenetically in some unidentifiable (to me) language, and after he got off the phone, he sighed and explained, "My wife wants me to pick up bread on my way home."
The cell phone raises nagging to a whole new level.
You can forget to take your cell phone only so many times.
We can be in touch anywhere, anytime, all the time. With anyone.
In Bonefish Grill, two guys who didn't look like business associates were sitting across a table from each other, both talking on a cell phone. Not just "Get back to you, later"; the conversations went on until dinner arrived, each guy looking just past the ear of the other, no eye contact at all.
I was reminded of a male friend who, in pre-cell phone days, said that he finally decided to get a divorce as he sat across a restaurant table from his wife and realized he had nothing to say to her. Today, he could just talk to somebody else.
Cell phones, in the hands of the right people, offer so much more opportunity for deception.
On a cell phone, you can call from anywhere and say you're calling from somewhere else. You can tell her you're out of town or at your kid's soccer game when you're really calling from Malio's.
Cell phones raise the contact level exponentially in an illicit affair. Before cell phones, it was so difficult to talk to each other. You couldn't call from home, she was never home when you were at the office, she couldn't call you at home, and so on, the frustration mounting to the point you'd risk it and call her while your wife was in the shower.
No more. The cell phone allows you to call her while she's on her way to pick up her kids at school, toweling off after yoga or cruising the produce department. And she can call you. The two of you can be in touch, all day, every day.
Of course, sometimes it can backfire.
As in the case of the Hillsborough County sheriff's officer in the midst of an illicit affair, who used his department-issued cell phone to call and receive calls from his lover. Oh, ho hum, everyone uses their company phones for personal calls. But thousands of calls totaling $6,007 in three months and three weeks? Surely this love affair gives new meaning to being in constant touch.
What on earth were they talking about? In all that time, they could have read War and Peace to each other, all of Proust with James Joyce's Ulysses thrown in.
Ah, well.
Technology advances; the psychopathology of everyday life stays the same.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
