The other day I was in Office Depot getting some river maps laminated. The Army Corps of Engineers has wonderful navigation maps available online of the Tenn-Tom and the Mississippi, two rivers I’ve been exploring in a kayak.
A large, soft-spoken young man with a reddish goatee did the work. He was attentive and indulged my wishes that the maps be perfectly aligned with the edges of the plastic.
“That’s no problem,” he said when I tried to explain myself. “You’re the customer.
“Besides,” he said, “I like maps.”
That something you rarely hear. For this map devotee, it was music.
“I don’t even have a cellphone,” he said.
Say again? This was a rare bird, indeed.
Meet Frank Creecy, copy and print supervisor, Office Depot. A self-described military brat, who spent his early years in West Virginia and California, Creecy, 27, dropped out of high school in Caledonia to accompany his diabetic brother through East Mississippi Community College.
And, once upon a time, when he was a teen, he had a cell phone. He tossed it when he was 19 or 20.
Creecy’s complains about the obvious and observable, the diminished person-to-person interaction cell phones have engendered.
“Everything is done via text messaging instead of actual human interaction,” he says. “There’s no emotion; you have emojis, but that’s not good enough.”
These devices can blunt real life experience. In our breathless need to respond to a text, find the answer to a bit of trivia or send an email during a moment of inactivity, we forfeit the here and now.
When Creecy told an associate he didn’t have a phone, she had a hard time believing him. “There are 4-year-olds with cell phones,” she said. “There’s nobody in this world who doesn’t have a cell phone.”
Cellphones have become an indispensable tool. For some, they are an all-consuming addiction. For all of us, they are a potentially lethal road hazard. Multiple studies conclude drivers are much more likely to be in an accident when texting than when intoxicated.
Check out your neighbor next time you’re at a stoplight. Or that weaving driver in front of you. Chances are they’re engaged with their device.
It is illegal to text and drive in Mississippi and 46 other states. Only 16 states prohibit all use of hand-held phones while driving. Mississippi and Alabama aren’t among them.
Here’s a safety tip. When driving (if not all the time) turn off the alert you get with a text and leave the ring tone active. Better yet, when on the road, switch off all sound and put your device out of sight.
But back to Frank Creecy’s argument, which is best made by the number of conversations not taking place in a restaurant because of cellphones. Or, on college campuses, the observable lemming-like devotion students have to their devices.
CNN reported that almost 50 percent of teens say they’re addicted to their cell phone. Apple has introduced a feature in its iOS 12 software called Screen Time to remind users how much time they’re spending time with their devices. Google is chock full of links to articles on ways to combat cell-phone addiction.
“Everybody tells me I’m weird because I don’t have a cell phone,” says Creecy. “I never wish for one.”
That said, he doesn’t rule out a change of heart.
“One day I’m going to get into a relationship and I’ll get one,” he said. “Because you are willing to make changes for love.”
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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