The Loudness of Pager-Free Silence
It was quiet on Wednesday morning. Too quiet. So quiet, we darn near forgot what day it was. Something was missing. We couldn’t place it, but it gave us a ticklish, light feeling, like a freeway with no rush-hour traffic and no catastrophe. Yet. That you know of.
Midway through breakfast, the teenager completed two full sentences without a phone on her ear, and it dawned on us: An entire family had been talking incessantly for hours without missing a beat. An entire morning was ticking by in suburban Los Angeles, and--that was it!--not a single communications device was bleating twee-tweet!
No twee-tweet from the little box on the husband’s waistband. No twee-tweet from the gizmo on the teenager’s wrist. No twee-tweet from anybody’s purse or backpack or briefcase. In other words, picture the hallmark electronic chirp of your typical, hooked-up, sky-linked suburban Southern California household. Now picture yourself drinking an entire cup of coffee, uninterrupted. How’s that for a picture of bliss?
If you’ve read the front page of this newspaper already, you are already aware that this was The Week The Paging Stopped. Evidently a satellite whirled out of whack somewhere out in the cosmos on Tuesday, causing something like 90% of the nation’s pagers to shut up.
I like to think that someone, somewhere, got so fed up with the constant tweeting and whirring and beeping that they picked up, oh, a used T-bone, maybe, and hurled it into the sky like a missing link in a Stanley Kubrick movie, smacking the Galaxy 4 upside the head. But to whoever or whatever up there did the planet that favor, I would like to say--face-to-face--thanks, geosynchronous friend.
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Oh, it all started so innocently, didn’t it? All we wanted to do was, as the writer E.M. Forster once advised, connect. There were efficiencies in being available, on call at all hours. (Or were there? Frankly, I’ve been so beep-infested for so long, I forget.)
But soon, as these things do, it overtook us. It’s one thing to have your obstetrician or your drug dealer handy; it’s quite another when that co-worker who shall go nameless interrupts your meetings with the bulletin that the Lakers are down by four and there’s sleet in Detroit. I know a woman who programs her pager to signal her every time someone sends her an e-mail. As the teenager would say, what’s that about?
And speaking of the teenager, what’s it about that some kid now pages her five or six times a day with the number on his football jersey, causing her to romp to the phone and page some secret message back to him in teenage code? And what’s it about that a hip guy in our office has just informed me that no one who’s anyone in L.A. uses pagers anymore, that they’re declasse now, not to mention bourgeois, in an age of palm-sized cellular phones?
I don’t know, but there seems to be a message in there somewhere. Something like: For the love of Pete, do we need to connect in so many ways? Is it possible that we’ve overdone this thing with the communication? Is it really necessary to reach out and touch everyone?
Or maybe it’s that there’s connecting and then there’s connecting. It’s said that, in Hollywood, people now only return phone calls when they’re positive that nobody but the answering machine will be home. Even a person-to-person phone call counts as an act of intimacy, that’s how hip and cool and disconnected we’ve become.
Maybe this was what prompted the thought, Wednesday morning, that we should give more than a mere nod to this satellite snafu. Maybe, in honor of the Flying T-Bone school of evolution, we should raise an uninterrupted cup of morning coffee to a National Face-to-Face Day, or an annual pager moratorium.
Bosses would be banned from pestering any employee not within spitting distance. Obstetricians would have to hang out at the hospital (the golf courses are getting too crowded, anyway). Instead, everybody would have to make at least 30 seconds of actual eye contact. Face time in the workplace could finally acquire some kind of meaning. Teenagers could finally hold their little heads up, unencumbered by the receivers of telephones.
The indigenous suburban Angeleno is a strange creature, however. When the family heard the eye-contact idea, they didn’t speak. The room fell quiet. Too quiet. “Hunh,” they said, nervously glancing around in search of their pagers. So I’m taking the plan public. All those who are with me, say Twee-tweet!
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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com