A Little Proxemics with Your Evening Tea

The year I got my driver's license, my senior year of high school, I was a member of the varsity basketball team. (I will let that go without comment, as it might make those who have never seen me play basketball think I was actually talented.) Because it made my parents' lives easier, with both of them working and my sister at a different school, this was also the winter I was allowed to drive my dad's (quite nice) car to school. Because I was a newly licensed day student at a school where half of the students had no access to a car and three-quarters of the students were too young to drive one anyway, this made me highly sought after as a giver of rides, at least, and on a new driver's high, I happily complied.

Did you think I forgot about the basketball team reference? Oh ye of little faith. I mention it because I remember one basketball team event in particular, a team party, that was to be held at the home of another day student. We were to leave from the school and get ourselves there, which meant that I was subtly wooed all through practice; there were only two of us with cars, and those who didn't snag a ride with one of us were to drive with the coaches, an infinitely less desirable proposition.

I probably wouldn't remember this evening at all, this team event, this short drive in my father's nice car, if it weren't for what happened when I unlocked the doors, and we all jumped in. For there, in between the driver's and passenger seats, right in the epicenter of the car, was a black, gleaming, gigantic device that looked like something out of a Star Trek episode. Or since I've never actually seen Star Trek, I'll revise: It looked like something the Professor would have made for Gilligan to attempt communication with outer space.

What I remember most were the oohs and ahs, the dead silence as I lifted it (straining a bit, it was that big, okay no it wasn't really, but almost) from its enormous base, and dialed my house. I provided my parents with some meaningless information and hung up, the significance itself ringing loudly in my ears. The silence buzzed. Finally, someone said what we all were thinking: Wow.

Yes, it was 1987, and I had just made an actual telephone call IN THE CAR. It seemed like a miracle, although a true miracle would have been if this basketball team had managed to win a game all season (some day I'll write about the time the coach of the other team forbade his girls from shooting at all in the second half so as not to humiliate us further). It seemed impossible, magical, awesome in the non-80s sense of the word. Joel H. Wilensky: Whatever else you want to say about the man, he was one of the early bandwagon-jumpers on the Car Phone Express.

I was thinking about all this (I realize even for me I've been hopping around like, well, someone on an awful lot of heavy medication) because a few days ago, in a feat that combines the subject of proxemics with the subject of my technological idiocy, I decided I needed to change my g-mail password. For one thing, a few close friends could basically assume my identity in five minutes flat if they so desired, considering how loose I've been with the log-in information. Nicole and Bryant: Stop ordering porn with my Pay Pal account. Just kidding. (This codeine is really strong stuff, apparently.) I was pleased by the fact that I managed to do this successfully, quickly, seemingly with no pitfalls. Until the next day, when I tried to access my e-mail from my Blackberry.

I kept trying, and I kept getting the same error message: Apparently the Blackberry would not recognize my log in attempts until I reset it with my new password, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do that. A technologically savvy friend couldn't do it either, and for this entire week I have not been able to access my e-mail when I am away from home. It makes me crazy, so crazy that I will probably next week go voluntarily to a Verizon store and beg them to help me, although I would under other circumstances choose having a root canal over setting foot in a Verizon store.

This is insane. I am not an executive. I have never in my life received an e-mail that needed to be answered within twenty-four hours, let alone in the ten minutes after its in-box arrival. The problem is that like Henry Higgins, I've grown accustomed. It now makes me uncomfortable, edgy, when I cannot check my e-mail whenever I feel like it. Not that I do check it all the time; that would be rude. But that the incoming business of the day (Has my neighbor played his Scrabulous turn? Has my dad read my blog yet?) is at my fingertips should I hanker for it makes me feel at peace with the world.

I'm not even going to get into how I feel when I don't have access to my cell phone. The me who wouldn't walk to the mailbox at the end of the street without it would be unrecognizable to that teenager who felt a thrill, if not an intimation that the world was about to change forever, when she made her version of the "man on the moon" contact with her mothership in front of her equally amazed basketball friends.

It is true that I do fairly regularly get work-related e-mails and phone calls that it's nice to be able to answer on the spot. But the world spun before I could do so, spun like a basketball on the tip of my index finger, which is to say a little wobbly, as though anticipating the imminent fall. For it was a fall, I think, in the biblical sense, a fall from grace, a fall from Eden, when we became accessible around the clock, and I think in our brave now world we are going to need to make some guidelines, set some rules for ourselves.

More on this--and I promise next time it won't just be the longest preamble in my own personal history. I would like to end by saying that I've always found the Verizon salespeople to have a certain serpentine quality. Hmmm.....