Let me use my phone, please!
IF women can have it all – and I believe we can – it’s thanks in large part to our smartphones.
So stop telling us to put them away.
On a recent Friday I had a 9am meeting in Chicago’s Loop area downtown, followed by an 11am interview at my office. On the 15- minute walk from the Loop to my office, I accomplished the following on my phone:
> Paid my daughter’s Girl Scouts fee.
> RSVP’d yes to a birthday invitation for my son. > Refilled three prescriptions at a pharmacy.
> Arranged a photo shoot.
> Answered my editor’s e- mail.
> Texted a friend to meet for lunch.
> Scheduled a dentist appointment. I don’t text while I’m crossing streets, and I’m careful not to run into my fellow pedestrians. And still, without fail, strangers scold me.
“Put your phone down,” a man scowled at me near Jewelers Row that Friday.
When I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, a guy waiting behind me in line for a cab tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Are you waiting for a cab or playing with your phone?”
“Both,” I answered, then went back to playing with my phone. ( I was actually trying to Google Map my way to Greenwich Village.) What’s it to him? I wasn’t holding up the line.
Everything I do on my phone while I’m walking or waiting is another thing I don’t have to do when I’m with my kids.
If that means I sometimes fail to take in the gleaming facade of the Wrigley Building as I walk past – well, so be it. If that means I occasionally duck my head and don’t look up as I brush right past Millennium Park’s jewels – well, I’ll catch them another time.
I put my phone down. I look up. I take it all in. But I do it on my own timetable. Usually when I’m with my kids. Or my husband. Or my friends. People, that is, who need and deserve my undivided attention. ( Jewelers Row man, you don’t need my undivided attention. You need to mind your own business.)
Other people’s lives, obviously, fall into very different rhythms from mine. Which is why I never turn a judgmental eye on parents on their phones at the park ( or the floor hockey lesson, recital intermission, bounce house birthday party place).
I don’t know what else their day entailed.
Maybe they spent the entire day feeding, enriching and screen- free entertaining young children, and this is their lone 15- minute window to make appointments/ check Facebook/ send out birthday party e- vites. Maybe they left the office early to hang with their kids, and they’re tying up one final loose end. Maybe they’re e- mailing their partner a grocery list. Does it really matter? Increasingly, having it all means fitting “it” in wherever and whenever you can. For that reason, smartphones are a godsend.
They also deserve some of the heat they get – for tempting us to text when a face- to- face conversation is in order, for turning us into distracted drivers and so on.
But a person using a phone is not necessarily a person misusing a phone. Let’s keep that in mind and cut each other a little slack.