Long posts

It was just before 4AM. Christmas morning.

The SMS notification on my phone blared at us.

WAKE UP THE DARNED UP. WAKE UP THIS IS CRAZY.

By the time the chime ended, my wife and I were wide awake. I asked her if she had gotten it too. "No."

That meant it wasn't her family. It was mine. Or a neighbor. Somebody was in trouble and needed help or prayer.

I got out of bed, concerned but also excited, and grabbed my phone from the other side of the room. Who was it? What was happening?

Merry Christmas

...

WHO ... SENDS a Merry Christmas greeting at 4AM on CHRISTMAS MORNING?!?!

Ah, my wife started getting the texts, she said. It's her brother up North, who has a newborn baby. Presumably he's awake because of the kid, and sent a group text to the family since he's awake.

He sent a group text because he knows we all set our phones to Do Not Disturb. That means our phones stop acting like phones at night. It protects us. When we wake up, we'll see the night's messages. Maybe he'll get some cred for being awake so early. Little footnotes for the night.

Well, my phone is dumb. It actually has some kind of feature like this, that I could enable. But I think it's pretty inhuman to set your phone to not wake you up. You let your phone wake you up by the government, for things like earthquakes, but not by your family or neighbors for things like emergency room visits? Can you think of other emergencies someone who can get your number might call you for at night? (Probably not! Nobody calls you.)

inhuman

It's letting the settings box you in. Like Jaron Lanier used to talk about MySpace's and Facebook's profiles defining people, and making people fit their lives into these boxes. It affects how you think about yourself, to fit your life into their criteria. Loneliness because they don't have a relationship for the box. Single.

"Oh, it would be nice not to be woken up in the middle of the night. I'll do that."

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where someone else might have your number? Or you might want your neighbor to rely on you in an emergency? Or the opposite.

It was 3AM. Some random day. I have no idea. I was asleep.

The phone is ringing!

WAKE UP THE DARNED UP. WAKE UP THIS IS CRAZY.

I popped out of bed. Maybe a scammer? Or something bad. My brain was drawing a black bar in the top of my vision because it wanted to be asleep.

Robert, this is impromptu, but could you come sit in my house for a few hours with the kids while I run my wife to the hospital? Her water broke and we need to go now. My mom's phone is on Do Not Disturb, so she isn't picking up. We started calling everyone else, but everyone is set to do not disturb. You're it.

A high-risk pregnancy, water breaking months early. Yeah, of course! I threw my shoes on, grabbed a book and a granola bar, and high-tailed it over to my friend's house.

Do not disturb is a humanizing settings, isn't it? In a way, it gives us more control. The phone can't bother us. The phone has to interact with us on our terms?

No, we are fitting our lives into the phone's boxes. Defining our behavior by the options it gives us.

I don't fit in that box. It means my interactions with my phone can be more frustrating, annoying. But that's the natural relationship with my phone; antagonism, annoyance. My terms are this strange, amalgamous, changing blob, and the phone can't possibly fit to it, so I set it to the closest possible and leave my weird blob self as I am, and the phone's shape chafes my blob shape.

It's not pebkac. The user isn't wrong. The computer is stuped. The computer doesn't work. THe computer and its conventions are limited. It exists to serve you, and it's bad at it.