cell phones.
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I hate cell phones.
My problem is not the ubiquitous idiot jabbering away while driving, nor is it the nimrod shouting into his phone at a restaurant. It's not the guy in a suit in an airport talking into thin air with his hands-free mic headset. It's not even the dolt at a movie or a play who's cell phone goes of in the middle of the show even after they reminded everyone to turn them off before the curtain went up. My problem is that cell phones just plain suck. People pay $40 bucks a month for even basic service, and the reception quality ranges from poor to none. It is bewildering to me that people pay so much money for a service that half the time just doesn't even work. I mean, if your car broke down every other day on the way to work, what good would it be? As far as I'm concerned, the current quality level relegates the cell phone to only two situations: car breakdowns, and coordinating to meet up with someone while you're out of the house. Granted, these are both legitimate, if niche, applications, but it seems like a lot to pay for something that is beneficial such a small fraction of the time. As usual, it all comes down to money. It costs so much to have a cell phone that a lot of people I know are ditching their regular phone service and going exclusively with their cells. Which means whenever I want to talk with them I have to put up with pops, clicks, noise bursts, and dropouts. It's not like regular phone service is all that great either. It mystifies me that we live in a time when the fiber-optic communications industry has undergone unprecedented hardship because of a supposed glut of overcapacity, and yet we still put up with the same crummy 4-kHz phone service set up way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. We've had 44.1-kHz, 16-bit DACs in CD players for more than twenty years; when are we going to get some of that kind of audio in our phone lines? (Of course, the answer is never. Again, it's all about money, not technology: despite all the talk about how low the dollar-per-bit ratio has gotten, there's just way too much invested in the existing switching infrastructure to ever expect decent service to the home.) So play your little low-fi video games, check you stock prices, send your text messages. But for goodness' sake, stay close to your tower. |