Sorry I Missed Your Call

Or am I? The past couple of weeks I’ve been sans cell phone. I’ll be restoring my service in a couple of days so today I’m reflecting on what it means to not have a cell phone.

The Obvious Cons:

1. Updating your Face book status and mobile picture uploads of your cat 8 times a day is now a thing of the past.

2. Your close friends can’t send you texts about where the cool party is tonight.

3. You can’t check your email from anywhere anymore.

4. You can’t send your friends random texts about how drunk you are and how much you love them.

5. You carry around people’s phone numbers on pieces paper in your back pocket.

6. You need to carry spare change for frequent pay phone visits.

7. While on the pay phone, you feel like everyone is looking at you, thinking, “What the hell is that big metal thing he’s holding to his ear?

The Pros:

1. ALL of the above with the exception of #7

2. There is now a void in your pants or jacket pocket where your 4.4 oz cell phone use to be, and it feels damn good. The spare change and paper with phone numbers you now carry still don’t outweigh your phone.

3. Less brain tumors.

4. There is less distraction from trivial nonsense. You won’t stop everything you’re doing at drop of a hat because one of your buddies texted you about a game of Call Of Duty 4 Online.

5. You’re not paying for a service you’re not using. More petty cash in your pocket.

6. You feel like its 1997, when people still talked to each other on land lines. It makes you feel warm and fuzzy. You consider getting a beeper and then remember that your cell phone was smaller than one, and beepers were gay.

7. Your parents cannot call you at anytime to nag you.

8. People KNOW they can’t reach you and it feels kinda good. There are some people you just don’t feel like talking to all the time. Never is even more soothing. Some of these people will not be notified when your service is restored.

OK, we’ve established that the pros really do outweigh the cons. So remind me, why am I getting my phone connected again? Well, I’m reconnecting myself back to the matrix like Cypher and abandoning the cause… without killing people in the process. You simply have to stay connected in today’s world or you’ll get left behind. As nice as it was to take a trip down memory lane, I have to join civilization again because that’s what is needed. If I knew how to live off the land and build my own shelter and tools like Survivorman, I wouldn’t need a cell phone or a Social Security number, etc. But I don’t, so I do.

Remember when your parents told you things like, “When I was your age, we didn’t have cell phones and inter webs and reality TV shows….etc…. and we got along just fine!” These are the same people that are strapped to a cell phone for sixteen hours a day now. Hypocrisy, no? My pops is one of those people – just worse, While I was growing up, he would preach about the downfall of society and the nuclear family because of technology and more specifically, computers. He was like Helen “Mama” Boucher in The Waterboy, saying things like, “them computers is the devil, Bobby Boucher!” I’m not even exaggerating. Pops is now a Face book junkie like the rest of the world. Sometimes I have to sit him down and tell him to stop harassing my female friends with pokes and snowballs and crap, especially the Asian ones. I apologize to them and they assure me that its no bother and that my pops is cute and all but its still kind of embarrassing, and I know they’re probably just being nice. Anyway, my point is, we cannot fight the progression of technology. We can only contribute to it and use it to our advantage. You can’t fight the future because you’ll get kicked in the balls real quick.

As many of you know, I’ve been working on a degree in Architecture for the past ten years. (I’m almost there, folks) A lot has changed since 1998. When I first got to Pratt Institute that fall, we had a tiny pathetic computer lab with only 6 stations running windows 95 and CRT monitors the size of Volkswagen’s. I think the Internet connection was 56k, but I may be lying. The lab was mostly occupied by crickets. As students, we were never allowed to use a computer for any CAD applications for our drawings. The professors at the time were old school and didn’t know the programs anyway. They stressed that we be trained by hand with the same rigor they enjoyed in their college years. I had no problem with it since I was still new to computers and liked drawing by hand.

Fast forward 10 years later. All incoming freshmen in the school of Architecture at Pratt Institute are required to purchase a laptop computer to complement their studies. The computer lab for the Architecture school now has roughly fifty computers, all networked with four laser printers that dish out 11″X17″‘s and two color laser plotters that print 36″X infinity. There are now available courses in Auto CAD, 3D, Studio, Photoshop/Illustrator, Maya, etc. but most of the kids coming into the school already know this stuff. Kinda makes one feel old. The truth is that I’m very grateful to have been schooled in the traditional methods before the big computer overhaul in the curriculum. Although I’m still a bit behind in software proficiency, I can still execute clear visual concepts with hybrid methods. Fact is, I’m gonna have to learn all this stuff really well at some point, or someone with more software knowledge will doggy-dog me out of a better job. The same goes for everyone out there. If you don’t know the software in your respective fields, you’re always one step behind.

From Wikipedia:

The Effects of CAD

“…Starting in the late 1980s, the development of readily affordable CAD programs that could be run on personal computers began a trend of massive downsizing in drafting departments in many small to mid-size companies. As a general rule, one CAD operator could readily replace at least three to five drafters using traditional methods. Additionally, many engineers began to do their own drafting work, further eliminating the need for traditional drafting departments. This trend mirrored that of the elimination of many office jobs traditionally performed by a secretary as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, etc. became standard software packages that “everyone” was expected to learn.

Another consequence had been that since the latest advances were often quite expensive, small and even mid-size firms often could not compete against large firms who could use their computational edge for competitive purposes. Today, however, hardware and software costs have come down. Even high-end packages work on less expensive platforms and some even support multiple platforms. The costs associated with CAD implementation now are more heavily weighted to the costs of training in the use of these high level tools, the cost of integrating a CAD/CAM/CAE PLM using enterprise across multi-CAD and multi-platform environments and the costs of modifying design work flows to exploit the full advantage of CAD tools…”