My name is David and I am a Smartphone addict, there I said it. I am one of the growing number of people who simply can’t conceive of a day without my Smartphone, who goes into a blind panic when I see the battery dip below one quarter full. So as Smartphone anonymous isn’t up and running yet (although it can’t be that far off) I have decided to subject myself to the unthinkable.
I will be living and documenting a day without my mobile (in the interest of fairness the Tablet is also getting the chop)!!! Don’t worry I will then document a day with the device so when the cyborgs look back on our great era they will know we came willingly.
For the first time in years my day started with the very unfamiliar chirp of the alarm clock, after scrambling around for about 10 minutes looking for my phone to hit snooze, it slowly dawned on me that today was my day without my smartphone. That’s when reality hit, how would I cope?
Once i had realised I couldn’t just hide on the bed all day and pretend this experiment wasn’t happening, I dragged myself forth and switched on the TV for my morning news fix. Sadly this normally happens before I even leave the bed with a quick scan of a few news sites and my twitter feeds.
Now Friday, proved to be a very bad day for this experiment as I had to fly to HQ in Israel, so there would be a lot of time spent sitting at the airport, rubbish at the best of times but without a mobile or iPad I was facing a very long day indeed. Not to be defeated before I began though, I decided to approach the day with enthusiasm so I ate my breakfast with gusto and jumped into the car to drive to the airport.
Then the first of many realisations hit me I couldn’t use my BA app, normally I would use it to check flight status, check in and display my boarding pass. Today this would not be possible so back into the house I ran to log on to my laptop to print my boarding pass. I have omitted here a lot of swearing which occurred but trust me it’s for your own good.
Back in the car, now considerably more grumpy, I began the short drive to Heathrow. The drive was uneventful and sadly Siri free, no sending messages or reminding myself of little things that occurred to me along the way. At Heathrow check in was slow and so my mood darkened further. When I had finally gotten through security I was now faced with a two hour wait.
Work needed to continue as normal, as you can imagine December is a busy time of year for us, so again the laptop came out, I logged on through my 3G card and read some emails, not a big deal as we have moved to Google Apps.
The issue for me was the sheer volume of emails, to be honest I spend most of the day scanning and acting on mails that come in to my phone wherever I am. It was a shock just how many emails sat awaiting my attention having not checked them since Thursday night.
Having ploughed through a lot of emails I hit my first snag of the day, SAP! I won’t go into the details but I needed to log on to SAP to approve something, this I have set up through an app which allows me to view relevant fields from SAP and Salesforce.
Sadly without my mobile and because of security settings, on my laptop I needed to VPN into the office log into SAP then log into Salesforce.com and do a lot of screen swapping before I achieved the simple task of approving a single PO. Absolute nightmare. Anyway task complete my flight was boarding. I climbed aboard and then realised I would now have neither eBook nor the media centre on my phone to keep me company without which believe me 5 hours seems a lot longer!!!
When we did finally touch down only then did I realise just how reliant I am on social networking to keep my family and loved ones up to date on my travels. Normally I would jump into my Facebook app and quickly post something about landing safely and then in a flash everyone you know and loves knows you are safe.
Not wanting to lug my laptop out again, I just left it. This I have to admit was most inconvenient as after that it slipped my mind and my nearest and dearest has spent the whole weekend chastising me for the lapse in memory. All I can say is finding a phone box is not as easy a task as it once was!!! The rest of the day was spent in a series of meetings and on Skype.
I won’t mention here the hundred times i went to check my phone that wasn’t there or the unending conversations that started ”didn’t you see the mail I sent you”. I have learned that yes I rely heavily on mobile technology to get me through the day but I now see that that is because it makes my life easier and in today’s hectic world anything that does that will get my vote. So I finish how I started ………My name is David and I am a Smartphone addict.
