A few hours without my smart phone!

I forgot to carry along my mobile phone today to office. The last time this happened was in 2011. And on both occasions, nothing much was missed on the mobile phone when I came back to it. The difficulty for the most part was psychological. However, a lot has changed in these 6 years. And this time, I felt my life depended more on my phone than it did in 2011. How? -

1. I was not able to tell (text) my wife that I reached office. Nor was I able to be in touch with her.
2. I was not able to view my official email on-the-go, which created uneasiness and stress in my mind.
3. I was not able to carry out any digital transactions of small value that I usually did through my mobile wallet - thanks to demonetization, I now use digital means even to pay extremely small amounts, wherever possible. And therefore I keep very little cash. So I didn't have breakfast - the banana I had at home was sufficient, I told myself - and just had tea by giving away 10 rupees. Well, another reason I skipped breakfast was to not lose any more time and to reach my desk and get connected ASAP. But there were more challenges...
4. This one has more to do with the crappy way my company's apps work and my bad day - I reached office and connected to the LAN, but couldn't open Outlook or Skype. And for any internal site of the company, including email, to be accessed through the browser, these days every time you have to enter a One-Time-Password which is sent on your mobile number registered with the company. So.... I was totally cut off from connecting with anything inside the company, despite being inside the office, despite using the company laptop and being logged in using my corporate ID. To be fair, this OTP thing wasn't supposed to be every time earlier but just for the first time and the system remembered thereafter... but some fuck-up in the network has led to the system needing it every time now. I took my laptop to the tech-support guys in the office, and they helped me get the OTP through a voice message on a landline phone at office - I was not aware of this option before, and I guess it's rarely used. (They couldn't fix the Outlook and Skype problems though. Repairing MS Office didn't help. I just lost 2 hours staring at the monitor.)
5. The sub-conscious scrolling of news and facebook apps looking at random things that never register in the mind at all... I missed this only a little bit, coz the mind was totally occupied and stressed by the stuff above. The phone I have now is much more smart than the one in 2011, but it seems most of the smartness of phones generally gets utilized in feeding us junk information better or helping us buy more easily.
6. The near-complete digitization of my job, and even our lives to a large extent, resulted in me feeling totally useless and meaningless when not connected and online. I could usually sit alone all day in a room and work while mentally being part of various situations involving lot of individuals - who are all just IDs, names and voices in a way, and so am I in that model - when am connected and constantly exchanging information through various digital means; but when all connections were lost today, it was just me in the room, and I was alone, and the comfortable illusion of being part of the various herds was gone. I was really alone.

Common with 2011

1. Not that I get a lot of calls, but the fact that I could miss some was creating stress in my mind. Thankfully most calls (even 1-1) in my company are over Skype (internet), and so I was less likely to get any official call on the phone, unless of course I couldn't be reached online - which turned out to be the case today. But when I came back home today and checked my phone, there was not a single missed call. Nor was there any in 2011.
2. While the phone was away, I was reminded of all the calls I needed to make, and everything seemed like long overdue, that had to be done without losing more time.
3. I didn't miss social media at all.
4. Not being accessible to anyone meant nobody could contact me even in an emergency. While this level of being inaccessible was more than normal 10-15 years back, it was screwing with my mind now, making me quite uncomfortable. This was normal life before we had mobile phones, but clearly my habits have changed, and so has my mind and its definition of normal.

As I realized the inseparability of phones in our lives, for a few brief moments thoughts about the future of these gadgets crossed my mind. Perhaps chips embedded inside and connected directly to brains would be very convenient - you won't forget, your hands will be free, and data will flow more freely. But it may lead to such seamless shit that your mind may be full of junk in no time - not that it isn't now, and we are mostly adopting it by making that choice through exposing ourselves to all such media and letting them drain our mental resources. But the scarier consequence would be the potential differences in capabilities between humans based on technology that they can afford, and thereby have many more ways of screwing each other. May be it is happening already, while you and I are busy entertaining ourselves with all this junk! And getting increasingly dependent on it!