There are people who are creators of unpleasant situations, similar to the Peanuts character, Pig Pen, walking around with a cloud over his head. I know many of these people and I have spent time pondering how to avoid them when a west wind dumps me near to them in public. For example, when you see someone in the grocery store you don’t want to talk to, take the first aisle and appear to be shopping for adult diapers. In the drug store, the condom display is always an option; no one wants to greet you there. When I was growing up, we used to cross the street if we didn’t want to greet the neighbor or duck into the nearest store when a cousin came around the corner. Those who were successful at avoiding the unwanted, evolved into sly cunning jungle cats, those who didn’t became porch dogs sitting in the sun listening to monotonous conversations about the ailments and sufferings of others.
But life is different now. Cell phones have changed the way we interact with people, merely by taking away the opportunity to “not” interact with those people. We rely on the phone for emergency situations but we use the phone while we are walking, driving, shopping, eating, resting, and working, and in doing so, we don’t even know the cousin is quickly approaching us. More often than not we are talking/texting at the same time, completely ignoring our surroundings as if the phone were a mobile pacifier tranquilizing our harried day.
There are not many situations in which i-phones are not an escape from life and they have become vital to our avoidance of human relationships. Phones are useful devices by design and purpose, same as an umbrella. Push a button and out pops an instant roof to protect you from the rain; push a button and shrink your personality to the size of a device you can hold in you hand. So much for evolution, ours is forcing us to remain near electrical outlets, otherwise our batteries will die.
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