Poor cell service: blessing, curse or both?

Ever since cellphones were created, Laguna Beach has suffered like an under-served alien in the Delta Quadrant.

With mountainous terrain, remote finger coves and a vast Pacific Ocean flanking us, we are the Bermuda Triangle of bad triangulation.

And for the most part, we just shrug.

When you’re tucked away in Wood’s Cove enjoying nearly yearlong summer, checking your Twitter feed should not be top of mind.

Or is it? Have we become so plugged in to the matrix that we have lost the ability to let go when it counts?

Kathleen Hardcastle of Arch Beach Heights knows about technology and priorities. Now retired, she used to work as the human resources director at California’s prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others.

So she tries not to sweat the small stuff.

“What really gets me — and I’m older so I’m not tied to my phone — but when you see people at a table dining together, each on the phone not talking to each other. It’s just an amazing thing,” she said.

Of course she would prefer better coverage in Laguna and can’t understand why, if we can unravel the mysteries of science with super collider gymnastics, we can’t string together some tin cans on a rope.

“Up here on the hill, it’s terrible with all the carriers, but lately, it’s just been awful,” she said. “What they need is a tower. I had heard people in Laguna fought having towers put in. I can’t see why it would bother anybody around Moulton Meadows Park because there’s no houses near it.”

Laguna and towers is kind of like Laguna and trees or Laguna and homeless shelters or Laguna and skateparks: not in my (very expensive) backyard.

Fortunately, the Federal Communications Commission has some hard-line jurisdiction over most of the cell tower issues. Basically, the agency has told local entities like Laguna to hang up the phone and go surfing.

But the issue of coverage is a good one. What is the minimum level of service that we should expect? And conversely, how much time should we be spending with electronics?

It’s not a new concern that we are raising generations of mini-Borgs: little techno-droids who have no real skills outside of thumb dexterity.

“It is interesting,” said Hardcastle, recalling her days of skills assessment. “I think about the children who never knew otherwise with the iPads and phones. It’s just kind fascinating how it changes.”

What would happen, for example, if we experienced some catastrophic event, like a solar flare that fries the cell towers. Or a blue whale-sized meteor that decides to land on Emerald Bay?

Google — gone.

Spell check — gone.

Selfies — gone. Thankfully.

Could you do your job without electronic tools?

More to the point, what value do you really have without the trappings of electronics? Are you defined by your phone, laptop or favorite application? Is your intellectual property simply vaporware?

“I heard something the other day that children are having trouble because they never learned to write because they’re using a keyboard, and apparently it’s impairing creative cognitive skills,” said Hardcastle.

It kind of prompts the question: Would you hire your own child?

“We’re so linked. And I think about that all the time,” Hardcastle said. “I love holding a book. I have the Kindle for when I travel, but I really like books. And also with TV, I have DVDs of movies I like, but now everybody is streaming so everything is in the cloud. It is interesting. Certainly less wasteful than having hard copies of everything, but it’s not the same as holding something in your hands.”

Whether it’s personal devices or corporate restructuring, we have become the cloud generation: virtual, streaming, real-time subscription services.

If the network goes down, we go down.

No email? Can’t work.

No cell? Can’t function.

No electricity? Chaos.

Except maybe here in Laguna Beach, where we are used to subpar service. Maybe, just maybe, our well being is not tied simply to electronics.

If everything else is stripped away, let’s hope we have something left that is tangible and worthwhile.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at hansen.dave@gmail.com.