A day without a phone

Today I decided to see how my day would look if I didn't take my phone to work with me.

It started with telling my dear wife about the crazy experiment. She was sad, she said that it wouldn't be an easy or fun day for her because she would miss me all day long. I said that I would miss her too, but it's only for one day. She also mentioned that if she needs me to buy something on my way back, it'll have to wait for tomorrow. That was a good point, and I actually reconsidered my idea, but we agreed in the end that I'd just go to the store after I got home. Yes, It'd be a waste of time, but this was an important enough experiment.

And so began my cellphone-less work day. The morning went pretty much as usual. My cell phone woke me up, I made myself some coffee, got dressed, and left the house. My phone has an app that tells me when my bus is supposed to come based on GPS information. The buses in my city are not very trustworthy in terms of schedule so I trust the app more than their official website.

My bus was late and I started to get stressed that I'd miss my train and considered taking a cab. Luckily, the bus decided to come. It was late, but not late enough for me to miss the train. If I had had my phone with me, that stress could have been avoided by simply checking the app. The bus ride was short and uneventful, I was thinking about what to write on this paper.

Next came the train, and for a minute there, my heart dropped, because I needed my credit card to pay for the train ticket and I generally keep my credit card in my phone case. Luckily, I had remembered to transfer it to my wallet for the day.

The train ride was terrible. It was during the train ride that I realized what a mistake I had made. After I sat down and took off my bag and coat, I thought for a few minutes about what I'd do next. “What did people use to do on the train before cell phones were invented?” I asked myself. They used to read newspapers, but I hate newspapers. They are full of lies, and exaggerations of reality, and they just give you a feeling of misery and despair. Five minutes of reading the paper and my entire day is ruined by the amount of negativity there. So no newspapers; what else can I do? I looked around, but to my surprise, literally, everybody was on their phones or laptops. I decided to think about my upcoming work day.

“Today, I'm going to teach about loops in Python to ninth-graders, afterwards I have web development with the eighth-graders, we are continuing JavaScript basics, and finally Scratch to the seventh-graders. I guess I can start learning ‘while’ and ‘for’ with them. Or whatever the Scratch equivalent is.” Planning the lessons took about eight to ten minutes of my hour-long ride. Because I was mostly prepared, I just went over the plan in my head again. Proper preparation may sound like an essential part of the teaching process, and it is. But when we are talking about teaching kids, unless some unpredictabilities are not taken into account, the planning is worthless. For example, material that seems simple to me might take three whole lessons for them to understand, and even after three lessons, some might find it challenging.

So what else can be done on a train? I can't read anything interesting online, I can't chat with my friends and family, and I can't continue the novel that I'm writing, which is what I do on the majority of my long commutes. This experiment started to seem more and more like a waste of time. Suddenly I saw a person reading a book. I felt really stupid at that moment. I could have taken a book! I just didn't think of it until now. Then it struck me - books! I can't read a book, and I can't continue my novel because it's on my Google Drive, but I can think about all the plot holes in my novel and consider how to fix them. And that is what I did until the end of my journey to work.

I took out a pen and paper from my bag and wrote down all of the ideas I had, but they weren't very good, because that is not how I usually write. Usually, I just make it up as I go, and only once the novel is complete, I go over it and fix it. This strategy might not be perfect for everyone, but it works for me, so most of my notes weren't useful in the end. At work, lacking a phone also turned out to be very inconvenient, because I couldn't call the principal when I needed her, and I couldn't look at my schedule which was on my Google Calendar. And my coworkers were upset that they couldn't find me and I wanted to be available by phone. I just told them that I had forgotten my phone at home.

The journey back felt like a complete waste of time. I had a few important phone calls to make, and I wanted to ask my best friend from a different city how his exams at the University had gone, and I wanted to ask my mom how her day was, and whether she was going to be able to visit this weekend. I wanted to continue my novel - I had some great ideas for the next bit. But all these things I would usually do on the train had to be pushed off for when I got home. I ended up doing all of my phone-related tasks at home, which resulted in pushing off all of my house chores, which in turn pushed off my bedtime, and the next morning I had had less sleep and was tired.

I would like to conclude this story with the moral I took from it. Technology has made our lives much more convenient, so why is it that so many people are against it? I have heard so many stories about people who decided to forgo the internet completely, and how happy they are without it. People who claim that technology is harmful and addictive. If you ask me, technology is a tool that makes everything more convenient. It's a time-saving tool, a method of keeping in touch with people who live far away but are close to our hearts. Technology can be used to improve our lives, and it currently makes my life so much easier and my time more productive. To people who claim that technology is bad for them, harmful for them, wasteful of their time, and is holding them down, I'd like to reply that the problem is not with the technology, the problem is with them. People who use technology wrong are not going to be happy. People who pointlessly surf the internet, instead of doing something productive, should not blame the internet for their procrastination. People who blame social media for the lack of real face-to-face communication should know that I have met many friends online, including my wife.

I use social media not as a way to avoid human contact but as a way to keep in touch with long-distance friends. And if I can do it, they can too. People who blame the internet for introducing their kids to inappropriate content should realize that kids were discovering stuff like that way before the internet, and the best way to deal with it is, to be honest with your kids and educationally answer all of their questions. They should learn it from you and not from the internet, friends at school, or magazines they found hidden in your closet. People who blame cell phones for lack of real communication should stop only looking for friends out on the streets and public places like the train and should go online to sites where there are people who share the same hobbies and interests and see how easy it can be to make new friends with the internet's help.

Every tool can be harmful. You can use a kitchen knife to make a salad or you can use it to kill your neighbor. And if you decide to use it for murder, blame yourself, not the knife. The same can be said about the internet.