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Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

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Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#51

Post by cercatrova »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #20
sysadm1n wrote: post #11

Well 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…

> So phones? Not always a big help.

I don't understand how you came to this conclusion when you simultaneously say

> [Jessica] called my people, whom I couldn't reach because I left my phone at home

If you had a phone, you could've just...called them yourself.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#52

Post by robonerd »

cnelsenmilt wrote: post #38
b112 wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

Now instead of pay phones in gas stations, if you have an emergency virtually every other person you might meet can call 911 for you on the spot, without having to run off to find a pay phone.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#55

Post by hadlock »

Cell phone is how my daycare communicates with us. We've only had our daughter in daycare for 3 months now and already we've had (very)two minor medical issues they needed/wanted our input on. It's also the device I use to organize who is picking her up from daycare at the end of the day.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#56

Post by ryanchoi »

Yeah, I opted for a smaller phone this last upgrade (in what, four years) in hopes of using it less and being less noticeable in the pocket. Used to have this big screen phone with which I wouldn’t have much issue watching or reading stuff on. Now with a much smaller one, “not” having a huge screen to consume media on, making it less attractive to do so, and it’s been working pretty well I think. Couldn’t bring myself to go full dumbphone, er, feature? phone.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#57

Post by b112 »

cnelsenmilt wrote: post #38
b112 wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

In the city, yes.

But my point was, there are other people around. Yell, bang on a house's door, go into the gas station, etc etc.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#58

Post by belltaco »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #30
dsr_ wrote: post #14

"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 borderline unusable for finding something that's not popular that's more than a month or year old. Multiple times I have spent more than 5 to 10 minutes trying to find something I have read a few years or even a few months ago and it's next to impossible to find it, even with time gating the results Google just keeps returning popular search results over specificity. The long tail is just ignored in their current algo.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#59

Post by cercatrova »

Invictus0 wrote: post #10
eyelidlessness wrote: post #7

I feel uncomfortable leaving without my phone, for one simple reason: I’m typically leaving with my pup, and if anything happens to either of us I want to be able to call for help. Pay phones are basically non-existent, people understandably don’t like to let strangers use their phone. It’s just a basic precaution.

> people understandably don’t like to let strangers use their phone Sounds like you're projecting here. What's your data for this?

I've definitely had this problem. There were times I lost my phone and had to get back home. No one would let me use their phone. It was not until I begged a gas station attendant to let me call someone I knew who could pick me up, that I was able to get home.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#60

Post by com2kid »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #40

I don't think it's healthy or normal to feel uncomfortable without a communications device. It's a sign of dependency. One should be able to put it out of mind and focus on deep tasks, leisure, interpersonal commitments and general real-life living without a neurotic impulse to check and inhabit a digital world. I don't have a smartphone (prefer a landline but keep an old Nokia around too), so my life is more organis…

That's nice and all, but when I travel overseas having a universal translator with me is super cool.

Being able to order a safe reliable taxi in most major cities, also super cool.

If you don't want email on your phone, don't set it up. But having a map that redirects me around traffic accidents in real time saves me a lot of time.

I'm not going to argue against smartphones being horrible little dopamine boxes, because they are, but you can get a smartphone and set it up as a purely utilitarian device rather easily.

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