CODA BY KEVIN G. SUMMERS
I
cancelled by iPhone last fall and it’s one of the best things I ever did. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t miss that device from time to time, because every time I have to drive somewhere unfamiliar, or wait around for a few minutes with nothing to do, I wish I had Steve Jobs’ greatest creation in my pocket. And whenever I attempt to make a call and have to press seven buttons before I can get a dial tone, I wonder if I’ve done something terrible. But there are a few advantages to not having a smart phone. First and foremost, I save an unbelievable amount of time every day. I was walking around the farm, checking email and interacting on Facebook the whole time. Now that I can’t do that anymore I save about 2 hours per day on my chore time! That one factor alone makes throwing the blasted thing into the fires of Mount Doom worthwhile, but wait, there’s more. I write for an hour every morning before I start my other work for the day. I want you to get an ac-
curate picture of what I’m talking about, so picture me staggering out of bed in the darkness, lighting up the wood stove while it’s so cold that I can see my breath, pouring a cup of hot coffee, and writing a novel about Native American monsters or government conspiracies or people living on a starship. I just had a new book (THE BLEAK DECEMBER) release last month. The only reason I have time to write and farm and manage this little old magazine is because I’m not constantly staring into an iPhone. So, what’s the downside? So far, the biggest difficulty I’ve experienced is that I no longer have GPS at my fingertips. I’ll tell you the truth, I get lost all the time, and I had come to rely on Siri to get me out of trouble quite a bit. I could certainly purchase a GPS for my truck, but I haven’t done that yet, so driving into the city isn’t much fun. Other than that... I don’t really see a downside. I have an iPad, so I can connect to the internet easily enough if I’m within range of a wifi
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connection, and I haven’t received a text in three months. All-in-all, I’d call life without a smart phone a win. Now if I could just figure out what to do with all this extra free time... Kevin G. Summers is the Editor of Submarine Telecoms Forum and has been supporting the submarine fibre optic cable industry in various roles since 2007. Outside of the office, he is an author of fiction whose works include ISOLATION WARD 4, LEGENDARIUM, THE MAN WHO SHOT JOHN WILKES BOOTH, and THE BLEAK DECEMBER.
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