A Man and His Phone: A Modern American Love Story

Today was an interesting day on many levels. The one level I’m willing to share with you involves what appeared to be a middle-aged man sitting in a car outside my house, staring vapidly into a phone screen without moving a muscle. How do I know he was middle-aged? Because the back of his head, which happens to be the only body part I could see, didn’t look young.

So there he was, just staring at his phone. Was he in the middle of a video conference with the President of France, discussing plans to start paying French persons to repair their clothing? Or maybe he was listening to his wife tell him about her morning, in full detail — including how she took the dog for a walk only to discover that he couldn’t find a suitable place to pee, and that she waited on the dog so long she missed nearly half of Fox & Friends. By the time she got home, she had to pee too.

I’ve had those conversations. Believe me. I once had a neighbor so chatty that even making eye contact would have meant committing the next 22 days of my life hearing about everything from the newly discovered mole on her neck to how her son, who lives in Michigan, thought he had COVID but then didn’t, but then got it later and had to stay home from work for 2.43 years because his boss didn’t want to have to quell a riot every time he sneezed.

I once made the mistake of saying, “good morning.” How was I to know there was nothing good about it? Apparently, that was my responsibility. My failure to be aware of just how rotten a morning it was landed me a sentence of 2 hours and 37 minutes of complaining. I only escaped because my neighbor finally ran out of air and had to take a breath. I’m not sure if there’s any such thing as a conversational hippo capable of holding its breath for unimaginable amounts of time, but if there is, I know where she lives.

So anyway, back to the possibly middle-aged male person sitting in his car outside my house. It was apparent that he and his phone had developed a close attachment to one another. As he gazed lovingly into its deep, mysterious touchscreen, it responded with a voice as warm and soothing as you can possibly get with a free, Android text-to-speech synthesizer. How do I know all this? A little purple dragon named Figment came and told me so. If Figment says something, it’s gospel. He’s more reliable than the internet.

I stood and watched the man and his phone carry on for as long as I could without experiencing projectile vomiting of my breakfast. But alas, I had to return to work — which is to say churning out hundreds of words that don’t really mean anything while pretending I am a semi-intelligent purveyor of linguistic artistry. Yes, I get paid to do so.

I’m not sure what phone guy gets paid to do. If his job is to drive people crazy by parking outside their homes and carrying on long conversations with small, electronic devices, I would say he is a true zen master. But if he works for Grubhub, somebody got a cold meal this morning. Come to think of it, that’s par for the course!