Smartphones & The City

At last the waiting is over

Today I went shopping with my wife. This is of course an extremely enjoyable activity. I love my wife and I love the city, as Petula Clarke famously sang,

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go, downtown
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown

So in order to forget all my troubles and forget all my cares, I went downtown where everything is waiting for me, downtown.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch a movie show or know some little place to go, rather if I didn’t choose to shop with Mrs Bain, my choices were to listen to the music of the traffic in the city, or linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty. My town is a bit light on neon signs and listening to traffic is about as much fun as waking to find that the cat has unwrapped the neighbour’s budgie. I happily decided to stick with Mrs Bain as we embarked on what she likes to call ‘shopping’.

Here’s the thing about shopping with your wife, and I’m sure many men will attest to this. We are good for 20 minutes, but that’s it. After that, we are done. What started out as fun and exciting quickly turns to wondering where the closest book shop is, or remembering that you own a dog and he needs a walk. However, you have agreed to shopping so you are stuck. Or are you?

The problem with shopping in the old days was that unless the shop in which your wife wanted to spend 17 hours had a comfy chair and a newspaper, you had to just stand there with a face like a slapped bottom. Our choices for enduring time was limited as we were forced to become a reluctant clothes horse.

But hallelujah, we are now saved. Saved by the smartphone.

The first iPhone arrived in 2007. That’s only 10 years ago. A mere blip in time. For 200,000 years man has impatiently watched and waited while his wife tried on mammoth skin coats and alligator shoes. But now, thanks to the smartphone we no longer have to endure waiting. Now we read the news, check sports results, play a game, write a blog, you name it we can do it all on our phone.

So while the smartphone is heralded for all that it does, in my opinion its main virtue is that it has eliminated the boring wait. Whether stuck in a supermarket queue, waiting for the kids to finish their dancing lesson or friends to arrive at dinner, the smartphone has changed waiting from a misery to a pleasure. Yes, the smartphone is the whole world in your pocket connecting us to everything. However, that’s not their real strength. The brilliance of the smartphone is that it gives us something to do when we have to wait.

Shopping with my wife is now not only interesting, I’m becoming smarter. A double whammy of happiness. I am patient and happy for Mrs Bain to spend 3 days trying on a pair of shoes. I simply take a seat, roll up my sleeves, squint a little, and giggle away at dog selfies. Breaking news keeps me up to date with world affairs and I can check emails so as to never escape work. If I’m really stuck I can pretend to give myself a haircut with the electric razor app (yes there really is one), its hilarious!

So next time a do-gooder on TV bleats on about how smartphones are destroying us all, just remember that in the 50’s they said the same thing about rock and roll. Also, next time you go to hospital for your doctors appointment, instead of suffering glacial time, pull out you smartphone.

It will save you.

Richard Alexander Bain
self confessed waiter