It was a simple heart-warming scene. A young mother was pushing her beloved toddler in a pram and arrived at the pedestrian crossing. Naturally, mum was talking on her phone as well. But the crossing required her to hit the button so that the lights would change for a safe crossing. What to do? It was one of those age-old conundrums which must have puzzled Marie Curious and Joan of Arkansas. With no more than a few seconds of hesitation, the gym toned mum deftly hit the button with her sneakered toe. Job done. But just think about it. This is a seismic shift in human behaviour. I call it phone hand. Phones have effectively eliminated one of a phone user’s hands for normal use. But never mind, we humans are endlessly adaptable and inventive.
Phone hand simply means that we need to use other body parts to compensate. With some contortions, feet, elbows and noses can be used to push buttons in car parks and crowded elevators. In desperate circumstances phone handers could use their tongues for button pushing, although probably not in hospitals. We can eat perfectly well with one hand using just a spoon or fork if all the food is pre-cut for us. I have a theory that the reason the clever Orientals invented chopsticks was to normalise one-handed eating when the other hand was occupied with a phone. Some daily tasks are admittedly quite difficult while holding a phone. Putting on clothes and doing up buttons and belts single handed requires either concentrated manual dexterity with tweezers, magnets and pulleys or a personal valet to dress you.
Typing on a laptop keyboard? Computer companies already have that covered with voice recognition and touch screens that respond to nose nudges.
Some sports adapt well to the phone handed approach, others not so much. Soccer is fine as your hands should not be used anyway. Go ahead! Kick, pass, tackle, dribble (the ball), even dive while you are holding your phone. Only the goalkeeper has a phone hand problem while blocking or catching the ball. Fortunately goalkeepers can now write off the cost of shattered phones on their income tax.
Golfing while clutching a precious personal communicator is complicated. It requires the phone to be held between the golfer’s teeth or under his or her chin while driving or putting the ball. But for most of a golf game the players are walking, standing around or drinking so the phone can be hand-held 99% of the time.
Tennis with a phone is tricky but only while serving. Serving with a phone hand does require a great deal of practice and a magician’s sleight of hand skills and a willingness to smash your phone to pieces with your tennis racquet, but it can be done. Once the serve is completed, tennis players can resume texting, tapping, swiping and posting as normal.
Many workplaces are already fully compatible with phone hand workers. In some offices social media breaks have replaced the cigarette or coffee break, allowing for phone addiction. On the other hand some jobs discriminate totally unfairly against the permanently connected phone user. Plumbing, playing a musical instrument and heart surgery while holding a phone are just too difficult for all but the most dexterous of practitioners with years of training. Juggling, operating a forklift or flying an airliner while grasping a phone? Very tricky but anything is possible. I am sure that some smart person in Silicon Valley in California or Sillycon Alley in my home state will invent a technological solution using 3D printing, big data and their own gut bacteria.
Phone hands in the domestic context are fine. In the kitchen, cutting vegetables like carrots or pumpkins with a phone hand simply needs the development of super strong phone hand knuckles to hold the veggies firmly onto the board. Kitchen cutters, please be careful. You don’t want to endanger the life of your little phone pal by accidentally carving it in two.
At the dinner table, slicing up a piece of grilled meat for eating merely requires a gravy proof cover on the elbow of your phone hand to press the food down onto the plate. This new habit also requires a change in the social acceptability of putting your elbow and other body parts into your meal in order to cut up your food. But mark my words, it will happen. Now that phone usage has become more important than civilized table manners and family discussion, irrelevant social customs must inevitably yield.
-Geoff Milton
