Dubai: My friends forgot to invite me to outings; I couldn’t be reached easily; I had to depend on verbal directions or my memory to get to a destination; and people actually had to spend around 30 fils per minute if they needed to tell me something urgent.
No, I was not stranded on an island with a volleyball named Wilson as my best friend; I just decided to give up my smartphone for a month.
And here’s how I failed.
“I want to get rid of my smartphone for a month because I’m sick of the stress it adds to my life,” I told my best friend. It was a thought that kept coming back to me and, one day, I decided to take the step. Walking on the streets of Satwa with a colleague, we came across an electronics shop that sells all kinds of phones.
“Ma’am, this has the dual Sim option, Facebook application, I give you best price,” said the shopkeeper.
“No, no, I want a phone without Facebook and internet. I want that one,” I said pointing at a phone, with a camera and a coloured screen.
The shopkeeper looked at me puzzled for a minute and then headed towards the shelf to grab the phone for me. Giggling in disbelief, he wrote the receipt and repeated: “I still give you best price.”
Best price or not, I was buying the phone and getting rid of my smartphone for a month with no regrets. I unwrapped the phone from the plastic seal like a child on Christmas day and started to explore the options this phone had to offer. Out of decency, I wrote a thorough yet straight to the point broadcast and sent it to all my friends on my WhatsApp application before shutting my smartphone for a month.
Though some responses from my friends were discouraging or overly dramatic, I powered through and removed my Sim card. I slowly took out the battery from my new Nokia, placed my Sim card, switched on the phone and let the tune ring in my ears. It was past 12am and it was time to sleep.
But wait, how do I set an alarm on this phone?
I had no idea how to operate this phone. There were times when I would slide my thumb from the top of the screen to the bottom to check my notifications only to realise that I was no longer dealing with a touch screen.
I was stuck for five minutes in the supermarket fishing for the calculator to calculate the change I should get back and, when I gave up, I actually had to do mental maths to figure it out. All these questions were answered once I familiarised myself with the phone.
By the third day of the experiment, I was restless without my smartphone. To be very frank, I was forced to get work done, I had little to no distraction since I wasn’t checking my phone for notifications every few minutes and I was just bored without my smartphone. Needless to say, it was costly owning such a small phone. Why, you might ask. Simply because I was buying 25-50 dirham credit almost daily to make calls and send texts.
For the rest of the days, I felt disconnected from all my friends. Though many of them stayed in touch by sending me texts every once in a while, they were unaware of what was happening on a daily basis. Many of them forgot that I was no longer connected to them via WhatsApp and forgot to text me about outings, assuming I already knew.
I no longer received family updates, funny videos of my niece and pictures of my grandmother recovering from her surgery on our family WhatsApp group. There were many times whem I would get excited, take out my phone to take a picture and realise that I wouldn’t be able to share it with anyone unless that person was sitting right next to me.
To be fair, there’s plenty that I learnt from this experience also. Other than the fact that I became an expert at the Snake Xperia game and turned into one of the safest drivers with my eyes on the road since I wasn’t fiddling with my phone constantly while driving, I realised how rude it is to be on your phone while someone speaks to you. It was humiliating speaking to friends with their eyes glued to their smartphone screen.
Two weeks into the experiment, I told my office colleagues that I could no longer carry on for the rest of the month. I rushed to the mall that same day, subscribed to a monthly plan, placed my Sim card in my smartphone and switched it on.
The screen lit up. My heart was racing — 1,654 unread WhatsApp messages. I exist. I was ecstatic.
Maria Botros is a trainee at Gulf News.
