: forget waldo, where’s a pay phone? :

Batteries have the life span of a mayfly. Wait, that’s an unfair generalization and I apologize. Cell phone batteries have the life span of a mayfly. No, that’s wrong, too — my cell phone battery.

This thing spends more time charging than the Light Brigade. It barely survives twelve hours before lights start blinking and it defaults into some energy-saving purgatory. Of course, that’s with light use; a few quick phone calls and a flurry of text messages. Add an email with attachments and a google search and, bang, dead phone. A jolt of electricity alone can restore it.

How is this a mobile phone when it’s always connected to a power source? And why does it need so damn much energy? The phone just sits there ninety percent of the time, waiting for a signal. Wi-fi is disabled, the location service is turned off. So how much energy does it need? I just sit here ninety percent of the time, too, and I can go eighteen, twenty hours at a stretch. I don’t want to, but I can.

My phone and I? We are at odds.

A watch battery, a device smaller than an Altoid, lasts for a year, very often longer, before it needs to be replaced. You don’t turn off a watch, either. They run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week — including Sundays and holidays. And when you buy one, there’s no wall charger in the box. No car charger. Nothing. Some of them even have timers and heart rate monitors andtrack the phases of the moon. How can that be?

Dick Tracy, crime fighter, he had a wrist radio. In his long and well-documented career there were no instances of battery depletion. Maxwell Smart, agent 86 and a top spy, had a shoe phone. It wasn’t connected to an electrical outlet, it was on his foot. So who was their provider, that’s what I want to know. Did they get good reception?

Now that pay phones are nearly extinct, I’d love a cell phone that can hold a charge. So where might one find a wrist radio or a shoe phone? At the spy store? Would that be considered an upgrade?

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