Only Your Mother Thinks You're THAT Important...

Jon Stewart, among others, took a few minutes to poke fun at Anderson Cooper when it was demonstrated to him that his Blackberry was contaminated with fecal strep.  I wasn’t even a little bit surprised—not because I think Cooper is more unsanitary than the average person; I don’t.  In fact, I’d be far more surprised to find out that it was relatively uncommon to find some kind of fecal contamination on most cell phones.  My hypothesis is based on using the ladies room at work.  Not one day goes by when I don’t encounter someone in the bathroom on their phone.  Mostly, because I work at a university and the largest age demographic is between 18-25, they’re texting but many of them are actually carrying on conversations in the bathroom.  In the stall.

I can see a logical reason why Anderson Cooper’s phone might make the trek with him to the bathroom.  He’s Anderson Cooper.  You can probably envision a scenario in which not getting that phone call right NOW might have an impact on his career, or at least the current story he’s working on.  It wouldn’t take a great deal of imagination to come up with logical reasons for, say, President Obama, Thomas Freiden (director of the CDC), your local police chief, or maybe even Sarah Palin might need to keep their cell phone handy at ALL times (“What’s that?  There’s a pie eating contest in Iowa displaying a cardboard cutout of Mitt Romney and I wasn’t invited???  Get everybody on the bus, quick!!”) but the vast majority of us do not fall into that Need to Know NOW category of life.  This is almost certainly the case if you are 19.  You can wait 5 minutes to get that call or text.  It isn’t going anywhere, I promise.

Anything you take with you into the bathroom risks fecal contamination, and it doesn’t have anything (or much, anyway) to do with washing your hands.  Every time the toilet is flushed, miniscule droplets are propelled into the air by the force of the water entering the bowl and flushing whatever it finds there down the drain.  The force of this water is generally higher in public bathrooms, creating more aerosolized water.  That water is contaminated with whatever has been in the toilet bowl recently and if you can’t foresee fecal matter having been in the average toilet, you probably aren’t old enough to be allowed outside the house unsupervised.  Or to have a cell phone.  It is not in your best interest to take anything you don’t have to into the bathroom stall with you, and this is especially true of anything you repeatedly hold up next to your face throughout the day.

I Know Where You Went Last Week...

This morning, every morning news show (at least every one that’s ever on in our house, which is most of them since my ADD afflicted husband can’t leave the tv on one station for more than 2 minutes) was screaming about the news that iPhones and 3G enabled iPads collect and record data tracking your whereabouts as you schlep them around town.  This is apparently a crisis even bigger than the narrowly averted government shut down that would have put thousands of people out of work indefinitely.  Who knew?  Ok, so your iPhone/iPad is collecting data on where you are and storing it on your device/synced computer.  Here's why this is a strange thing to panic about:  

1) It's on YOUR computer--as in the one you own-- and the little gadget you’re carrying around in your own hand.  Let’s start with the gadget.  These things are not cheap, so unless you have the common sense of cottage cheese, you’re probably pretty careful about where you leave it lying around. This necessarily limits the number of people who are going to access the information on it.  They’re also very small and light (read: MOBILE), which is likely part of the reason you bought it; meaning you’re probably keeping it pretty close to you most of the time.  As for the computer to which it syncs, you probably have way more sensitive info on there, anyway.  If you’re the kind of person who only uses your computer for word processing, you’re probably not the kind of person who buys an iPad/iPhone.  It’s much more likely that you use your computer for EVERYTHING—taxes, budgeting, personal contacts, stocks, shopping, record keeping…. Hopefully you've taken steps to secure all of your information already.  If not, you've got bigger problems than someone knowing you were at Banana Republic yesterday.  

2) Where you've been is public information by virtue of the fact that OTHER PEOPLE CAN SEE YOU!  Unless you're the Invisible Man, someone else already knows you stopped at Starbucks on your way to work.  Lots of someones.  This is the whole reason private detectives can make a living; they can see you to follow you around and report on where you’ve been.  There is no implication of privacy when you’re out in public.  The fact that you’re in public is not classified information.  Even your home address is public information in most cases, unless you’re completely off the grid…in which case, you’re almost certainly not in possession of an iPad.  Although I would certainly expect some amount of privacy in my own home, the fact that I am home is still not a state secret.  My neighbors and anyone who walks by can probably figure out that I’m home from the fact that my car is in the driveway and the lights are on.  Some of them probably saw me pull in and walk in the door.  This is especially true if you live in my mother's neighborhood.

3) If you’re the kind of person who owns an iPad, you probably also have a cell phone, and maybe even a GPS.  If you own an iPhone, well, I hate to break this to you if you didn’t already know it, but you own a cell phone.  Cell phone companies already track your whereabouts while your cell phone is on (and not to belabor the point, but if you carry an i-gizzmo, you’re not likely to be the sort of person who only turns their phone on in an emergency).  The only difference here is that they have the info, not you.

4) This is not a chip that’s been implanted in your head without your knowledge.  It’s a hand held device, with no discernible means of locomotion on its own.  In other words, you don’t have to take it with you.  You can, in theory, leave it behind.  If you don’t want it to know where you’ve been, don’t take it along.  There are no recorded cases of i-withdrawal being fatal.  I promise.

5) This is perhaps the oddest point.  Folks who use iPads and iPhones are usually the same ones using the internet.  A lot.  Otherwise, there’s not much reason for you to have one of these gadgets.  You’re probably also on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare (which, btw, is simply a means of letting other people know WHERE YOU ARE), MySpace, etc.  It seems incongruous to log the details of your fight with your son, what you had for dinner last night, where you grocery shop, which team you’re currently rooting for, and your thoughts on, well, everything, but want to keep the fact that you went to work on Thursday a secret.  I’m not sure I follow the logic there.  If you’re already sharing many of the intimate details of your life, why are you worried that your iPhone knows you went to McDonald’s last weekend?

Toddler Benchmark

My New Year's Resolution this year was to not accept any behavior from students that I would not accept from my own children.  This doesn't seem like it should be a very high bar to reach, given that my youngest child is not yet 2, but you'd be surprised.  Or maybe you wouldn't.  My sisters, Real World Skipper and Stacy, tell me horror stories about colleagues and subordinates who think "I lost track of time." is a legitimate reason for a 3 hour coffee break or that sharing the gory details of your last vodka binge with a virtual stranger is an appropriate work behavior.  So now I am on a quest: to do my best to make sure that the young people who pass through my door are at least marginally prepared to go out into the world and, if nothing more, pretend to be grown ups (which in reality is what most of us are doing anyway--pretending).

My first battle in this war has been over cell phones.  Now don't get me wrong; I love my phone.  Well no, I love the concept of having a cell phone, but I'm not particularly enamored with my current model. That's not relevant.  The point is, I have no objection to the concept of a cell phone.  What I do object to is having to send messages like the following:

Just a reminder that cell phones/smartphones/Blackberries should be turned off during class time.  Midge (obviously not the TA's real name) and I have both received emails sent from a student's Blackberry during class time this semester, something that is not an appropriate use of classroom time.  From now on, emails sent during class will not receive a response.  If you have a question or problem related to class material or an assignment, please ask during class or speak to us afterward, otherwise please wait until after class to send emails.


What is troubling is that I'm not sure whether it bothers me more that this student was obviously way too busy texting during class to bother stopping to ask her question in real time, or that it did not occur to her that the message was going to come in stamped with both the time it was sent and the ubiquitous "Sent from my Blackberry" signature.


Then there was the conversation I had with an otherwise very bright young woman after I asked her to put her phone away during class.  She came up after class was over to apologize for texting during class and then added "but I was really angry about something and I couldn't stand it, so I HAD to get it out," which left me wondering what would have happened if she hadn't had a cell phone handy.  Would she have exploded?  Would she have suddenly jumped out of her seat during class and begun screaming about whatever made her so angry?  Probably neither.  She would probably have come to class, complained to the friends sitting around her briefly, and then either seethed about it during class or been distracted by work and forgotten about it until she left. 


And THIS is what it is that bothers me about cell phones--confusing immediate with imperative.  Just because you CAN broadcast every thought that wanders through your head at the nanosecond that it does, does not mean you have to.  Just because you don't have to wait to transmit whatever it is you've just now thought of, doesn't mean you shouldn't.  The idea that my phone is ringing, I MUST ANSWER IT NOW baffles me. Human ingenuity invented answering machines for land line phones to avoid this very idea!  Your phone and mine and pretty much every other cell phone traveling around in someone's pocket or bag came with this very cool feature.  If you don't answer it, a very nice lady will answer on your behalf and tell the person calling that you are unavailable and will record whatever it is they have to say for you to listen to at some more convenient time.  Preferably a time when you are not sitting in class, taking an exam, driving down the interstate, checking out at the grocery store, or sitting at the dinner table with your family.  And texting is even better, because there is no middle man (so to speak).  The message goes right to your phone and there it sits, patiently waiting for you until you get around to reading it, again, preferably not at any of the aforementioned times.  Honest.  I swear.  They do not have expiration dates.  I know this because I have text messages left in my inbox from 3 years ago, and they're still sitting there waiting to see what I will ultimately do with them.  They've go nowhere else to go.


Perhaps I should have mentioned all of this to the young woman who was called into my office to meet with me after she plagiarized not one but two papers and skipped two exams in class.  When she showed up in my office, a minor miracle in and of itself given her difficulty in making it to the classroom, she waltzed in and sat down while she was talking on her phone.  I instructed her to please go back outside and finish her call before coming in to meet with me.  She stood up, sighed, rolled her eyes, walked just outside the door and while looking at me said "I gotta go, Babe.  She's making me hang up the phone."  I considered telling her I was not making her do anything; she was welcome to go elsewhere and carry on her conversation.  I also considered yanking the phone out of her hand and tossing it out the office window.  In the end I did neither, because I recognized that someone who feels put out by being given the chance to salvage their college career after plagiarizing two papers and skipping multiple exams is well beyond the aid of voicemail.