When Celfones Get Lost

I still cannot get over my lost cellfone, Nokia 7260. It was given to me by my son for my birthday last year. But not yet a year old I lost it in Magsaysay Village, Tondo while going there one evening to remind the women about the trip to the Museo Pambata the following day. Since that time, February 2007, I have hardly stepped at the Village. I feel numb whenever I go there.



Why is it so traumatic losing a cellfone? This week I read a headline about an individual saying that the cellfone is more important than her wedding ring. A cellfone is one's communication with the world. Can you imagine folks that for many decades, about 4 decades, in my case, I never had a decent line of communication. The cellfone revolutionizes our way of communicating with other people. We can be contacted very easily wherever we are. Well, if you were here in the Philippines before the entry of cellfones, you can imagine us roving around to look for a public phone somewhere so that we can keep in touch with our friends and business associates. At home, we shared phones with the rest of the family members and have to queue up in order to get our chance to make a call.



Then the pager came and it seemed a good answer to our being accessible when out of the house. So as soon as it rang, whereever we were, we would rush to the nearest public phone to return the call. I also remember seeing that tall building in Cubao, the Pocketbell office where I used to pay my bills. But now it is gone. The pager is obsolete, now taken over by the Scandinavian and Japanese devices, the cellfones.



Going back to my lost cellfone, I lost also the phone numbers of very important people in my work. It was a good thing, I was able to list them down in a notebook one time. But the trouble of writing them again to another cellfone is very tedious. Maybe we should have a bank somewhere in the satellite in which we can secretly bank our phone lists and access them should we ever lose our cellfone.

The most recent models boast of having a capability for the user to watch tv programs. Now, I don't really like that because it could be abused and draw the user to dangerous levels. For example, we could get so engrossed watching the tv program while driving and then lose control of the wheels. I think that we should retain the integrity of the device -- it is small, so its features should be enough to serve as a communications medium.


Anyway, what else is in the offing in the realm of communications?