Can You Hear Me Now?

June 30, 2004

Everywhere you go now in the city you see people with one hand up to the side of their face like they have an ear ache, except they’re talking into their palm. I have seen people do this while driving their cars, even while driving their cars with stick shifts while going around a corner, which anyone who has ever driven a car with a five-speed manual transmission knows requires two feet on the pedals, a hand on the steering wheel, and a hand on the gear shift. This demands dexterity worthy of a Chinese juggler at the circus.
Curious bloke that I am, I finally figured out that those strange people had concealed cell phones up against their faces. On the bus one day, sitting behind a lady whose face was turned away from me, I listened into one half of her loud conversation with her hand. I couldn’t make out what the other party was saying, and when she got off the bus I asked a passenger across from me, “Did she have a phone?”
Turns out she didn’t.
She was talking to herself. Okay. I’d once watched man on the New York subway who carried on a heated and spirited conversation with the invisible person in the empty seat beside him. I wasn’t sure if the seat was really empty, or whether I was temporarily blind to manifestations of protoplasm. One can see anything on the New York subway. I was sober at the time and think the man was, too. He just happened to have what we in kindergarten called an imaginary friend.
If you think you can tell the difference between someone with an imaginary friend, like my lady on the bus, and a sane person actually using a cell phone, beware. There’s new Japanese technology afoot, or rather at hand. It’s Tu-Ka’s wrist watch phone called the TS41, not to be confused with an AK-47 or a B-29. What the Japanese phone does is carry the sound received by the innocuous wrist watch (Dick Tracy, are you reading this?) through the bones of the owner’s index finger, to the ear. To listen in to this phone you hold your finger in your year as if you are groping for something nasty in there. Following the principles of hearing aids that use bone to transmit sound to your inner ear, the TS41 uses your finger. To talk back, you talk to your apparent wrist watch.
I have a wrist watch. I also have a finger. If I stick my finger in my ear and talk to my wrist watch while talking to my imaginary friend on the bus no one will be the wiser. Boy, will I fool those curious, fellow bus passengers.
So, you think it’s weird to talk to your wrist watch? Then try NTT DoCoMo’s new Finger Whisper phone. This baby looks like a thin bracelet worn along with rings on three fingers. The movement of the fingers is interpreted by the bracelet, which knows hand movements like a blind man does braille, when you dial the imaginary phone numbers. No dial set necessary.
You think wearing a bracelet and three rings is a bit too girlish for your taste, fear not. There’s now a credit card phone. . As my classmate Dave Barry says, “I’m not making this up.” (We went to different schools together.) The size of an ordinary credit card, but three times as thick, this actual phone has a number pad printed on the surface like one of those super thin calculators. I learned you can make such smart cards, when the university issued me a new ID card with a chip imbedded in it so I could load it up with a cash balance at a reverse ATM-like machine for campus purchases, but a PHONE? Alas, this one is only good for outgoing calls
Might be just as well. Conversation on a bus: “Excuse me, but my phone card is calling me. Hello? I’m on the bus. Can you hear me now?” You could try this yourself using any ordinary Discover or Visa card. Nobody will know the difference.
Just to see how they work I bought one of those hands-free headsets to plug into my wireless telephone. I can wear it while walking down the street. Hands free. No cupping the palm against the side of the face. No phone needed. With the button in my ear and the little microphone out front, I can pretend I’m a secret service agent. “OK, HQ. This is Cobra Five. I have the quarry in sight.”
Who needs an imaginary friend?
One of these days they’ll do a phone implant, a nano-phone inserted under the skin next to your mastoid bone. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what the guy had in the New York subway. And I thought he was nuts.