Prison Cell

If you live in any kind of urban or suburban area, you've seen it too. A group of young people, standing on a corner, talking away, but not to each other. Each one of them has a cell phone and none of them are talking to the person standing next to them. They are busy having conversations with people who are someplace else - because they can.
If you have driven anywhere in the country in the past six months, you've seen it too. Drivers who are too absorbed in the conversation they are having with someone on their cell phone to pay attention to the traffic, traffic signals, and laws that surround them. They're driving along with their phone pressed to their head with one hand while they steer, shift and gesture with the other, because they can.
If you have friends or relatives, you've received these calls too. People who have night or weekend minutes that are burning a hole in their cell phone bill, so they call you from their car or the line at the deli or the laundromat - because they can. They don't have much to say, they just want you to know that they can.
A recent study by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sociologist Noelle Chesley showed that cell phones and pagers were linked to increased psychological distress and reduced family satisfaction for both sexes. Here's the image that sticks in my mind: A young couple walking through a mall with their five year old in tow, both of them jawing away on their phones while the kid wanders aimlessly between them, herded along with a free hand every few moments, just to keep the family connection fresh.
"Women get kind of a double whammy," Chesley added. "For women, in addition to having a lot of this stuff from work spill over into home life, they get the opposite. There is also a lot of negative stuff from home spilling over into the workplace." We look at our cell phones and excuse ourselves politely, "I'm sorry, but I've really got to take this." Well, no. Not really. Every phone I've encountered so far has a unique feature: an on/off button. Turn them off. Leave them off. Be out of touch - for a while, at least.