My Motorola Mpx200 cell had a great feature that makes finding a contact infinitely easier. To call someone already listed in your contacts, you just key in the numbers on the keypad that correspond with the letters and it narrows down the possibilites as you type each letter. It’s basically T9 guessing for contacts. It’s very fast and makes it so that I can keep hundreds of contacts in my cell and still find them easily.

In about October, my phone started flaking out on me, so I sent it in for warranty repair. While waiting to get it returned to me, I was using another phone that didn’t have some of the features that I loved on my Motorola.

One day I was whining to a middle-aged friend about how much I missed my Motorola and how inconvenient this temporary phone made my life. I had to actually scroll through a ton of names to find the person I wanted to call.

He looked at me like I was crazy.

“And how much more time does that take?” he said.

Thinking he was sympathizing with me, I griped, “It makes it take about 30 seconds longer!” I immediately felt embarassed as I realized how silly I sounded.

“Yeah? I remember just a couple of years ago when I would have to pull out one of these and flip through it, then actually dial the number,” he said, waving a little pocket address book.

I have come to the startling conclusion that “modern convenience” quite basically trains us for a lifetime of impatience. If I am writhing in pain because I have to scroll through a bunch of names to make a phone call, I’m in sad shape.

And I am.

I rarely cook anything more than “one step” meals because it takes too long. If I’m busy, I just won’t eat.

I have my email forwarded to my cell phone because I can’t stand going more than an hour without checking it.

I took eight books, my laptop, my iPod, several DVDs, and an entire recording studio with me when I went on vacation! Knowing I might be without Internet access for a week, I made sure my RSS news reader was completely full of more than 3500 articles. 3500!

There is a mild desperation that I sense fairly frequently, a feeling that I am wasting time or missing out.

Is this simply a connection addiction? Perhaps. I have been very wired for a very long time.

On Tuesday, I bought the MPx220, the latest version of my old phone. It’s even more deft at enabling impatience.

Using its built in Bluetooth capability, it will sync my appointments, contacts, and to do list with my laptop computer without me physically doing anything.

Also using my phone’s Bluetooth modem, I can now get on the Internet anywhere I have cell phone service.

Unfortunately, to set all that up the way I wanted it took me two days of constantly messing with it.

Modern convenience is a wonderful thing.

Or is it?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 7th, 2005 at 9:33 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.