People. Turn your phone off. You can survive without talking on it all the time.

Show respect to the people around you by not sharing your personal information as you yammer on the phone. Be kind to the person behind the counter and don’t talk on your phone while you are checking out.

You don’t need your phone on all the time. It is ok to turn it off. Or at least turn off the ringer. Trust me. You aren’t going to get a call from the Pope. It can wait. Nothing has to be dealt with right away. It can go to voicemail.

You look crazy when you have a Bluetooth device in and you are using it. You look like you are talking to yourself.

My husband gets so upset when someone calls when he is driving or we have just sat down to eat supper. I tell him to not answer. The phone is there for him – he is not there for the phone. He is slowly starting to understand that it never is an emergency and people can wait. If it is an emergency, they need to call 911.

I once worked with a guy in his 20s who had a hard time grasping that he could not have his phone at the front desk. He said “what if my family needs to get a hold of me?” They can call the office phone and ask for you. He didn’t grasp that he wasn’t the person they would call in an emergency anyway. He was the one who constantly needed to be rescued.

I’m in my 40s. When I was growing up, nobody had cell phones and we did just fine. If our parents needed to reach us at school, they called the office. If our friends needed to call us, they called our home. If we weren’t there, our parents took a message. It wasn’t ever something that had to be dealt with right then.

It isn’t really that urgent now. Nothing has changed, except we have been trained to think that we have to be connected all the time. We are being programmed to do a lot of things all at once, and we aren’t doing any of them well. We’ve forgotten that tools are there to serve us. We aren’t supposed to serve them.

People will call the library to renew their items. I’ll ask for their library card number and they’ll explain that they are driving. They can’t give me the card number because it is on their keychain, so they can’t safely look at it. I tell them to call back when they are parked safely. There is nothing that needs to be done while you are driving that is more important than driving.

I know people who use the time they are driving to make all their calls and pay all their bills. What did they do before cell phones? Everything got done. Somehow we have forgotten this.

I think we have lost something in our need to multitask. We have forgotten how to remember what we were going to look up. We have forgotten how to take the time to be courteous to the people around us. We have forgotten how to do anything later and let things wait.

We have become addicted to doing everything right now, when really nothing is that pressing. The phone uses us more than we use it. It has convinced us that we have to have it. Consider turning off your phone, for even one hour. Do you feel twitchy’? How about a day? A week? Getting nervous yet?

Perhaps we need to start a 12 step program for cell phone addiction.

If you feel you have to use something all the time and it is something that you lived without before it existed, that is a sign of a problem.

Sure, cell phones and smart phones make things easier in certain ways. But they don’t seem to really improve our lives. We seem to have trained ourselves that we can’t do without them.

We’ve done the same with fast food and prepared meals. We’ve forgotten how to do things ourselves. We’ve forgotten how to take care of ourselves. In our “need” to multitask and do everything right away, we’ve forgotten how to do anything well.

Our lives have become like fast food by using cell phones. It is fast and not real. We have sacrificed quality for speed. Faster doesn’t mean more efficient.

Multitasking is newspeak for screwing three things up at once.