I've been doing this on purpose lately...
Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
41–50 of 395 posts
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#42"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and e…
So I had a feeling "without a terminal" was a typo and I wanted to look up the exact quote. I googled the sentence and expected the right quote to be at the top, but all Google gave me was results for helping people with terminal cancer cope with their coming death. It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.
Google is optimized around showing ads, not returning relevant search results.
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#43It used to be that pay phones were everywhere, but because of the plethora of cell phones, they have all been removed. So yes, it's a little unnerving to forget my phone at home.
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#44We shouldn't call it phone.
Who uses it as a phone these days anyway?
For many people it's their life's central information nexus and it's absolutely normal to get uncomfortable when leaving THAT at home.
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#45I think it's fine to be uncomfortable without your phone. It's understandable: they do so many useful things. However, it turns out what this post is really about is work communication, not about the functionality of phones that enhance our lives. When you're trying to get friends together, find a nice place to eat, and get directions to meet up, having a phone is far better than not having one. I wouldn't want to be…
> I think it's fine to be uncomfortable without your phone. It's understandable: they do so many useful things. The problem is that you can't take what's in your phone and have it somewhere else: for example a web-browser in a public space like a library or an internet cafe. If that were possible, then it would be less of a problem to leave your phone at home.
To everyone in this thread, wanting work and home separation.
If you're doing well in tech, then you have cash to enable options. One is, a dual sim phone, and your work sim goes off at 5pm.
The same goes for fetching work email. Off at 5pm.
Loads of apps to help with this.
Without dual sim, there are voip forwarders, a second phone, loads of options.
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#46Well not that I live in a bad neighborhood or anything like that, but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid. If you're concerned about privacy buy one of those cheap Nokia dumbphones that old people use. Keep your smartphone at home, and swa…
I'm not really blaming you here, this attidue is very normal these days, but a mere 25 years ago, most people had no cell phone, no mobile phone, and never, ever suffered mishap as a result. (Inconvenience is not what I call a mishap) I grew up in the country, and a few times had to walk 20 miles home, due to a dead car. Being a rural area, after 10pm, I might see 1 or 2 cars the entire walk home (4 hours and a bit).…
Survivorship bias, it is totally a thing!
There are mountain tops that have cell service now days (great line of sight!). People get lost in the woods pretty often.
Heck just having a compass + map that works offline can get people unstuck. How many lost person stories used to end with "and he died just a few miles from the nearest town"?
Of course that sentence is now relegated to history because because almost everyone has a GPS in their pocket!
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#47It's for emergencies too. I've had to call 911 before. I also want to immediately know if my wife or kids are in trouble. This is not unreasonable.
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#48"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and e…
So I had a feeling "without a terminal" was a typo and I wanted to look up the exact quote. I googled the sentence and expected the right quote to be at the top, but all Google gave me was results for helping people with terminal cancer cope with their coming death. It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.
Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want.
It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods.
I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO.
This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful".
Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#49Well not that I live in a bad neighborhood or anything like that, but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid. If you're concerned about privacy buy one of those cheap Nokia dumbphones that old people use. Keep your smartphone at home, and swa…
There's places where a phone won't help you at all. On the other hand, just screaming will. Screaming, like not yelling, screaming. Helped me out exactly three weeks ago today, when I was getting coercively shepherded by supermarket guards, into the supermarket, because the cashier accused me of not paying. But they weren't interested in seeing my receipt. Just in harassing me. Fortunately Jessica at the Farmacias Ma…
> And I couldn't use a phone because my hands were full
Sorry, but you could have used a phone.
Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really blaming you here, this attidue is very normal these days, but a mere 25 years ago, most people had no cell phone, no mobile phone, and never, ever suffered mishap as a result. (Inconvenience is not what I call a mishap) I grew up in the country, and a few times had to walk 20 miles home, due to a dead car. Being a rural area, after 10pm, I might see 1 or 2 cars the entire walk home (4 hours and a bit).…
25 years ago there was a pay phone in every gas station, and in denser areas in every corner market, bus terminal, grocery store, hotel, ..., not mentioning those installed directly along the street.
People also didn’t live under the expectation of being reachable 24/7.
Similarly, people used paper maps while driving which were cumbersome, but didn’t live under the expectation or the opportunity of traveling to new locations regularly.