Monday Meandering Cell Phone Rant

This weekend definitely reminded me that fall is on the way. Yesterday it didn't quite break 70 and was down in the upper 40s last night. Cool enough to close most of the windows and still feel cold this morning. It has already been cool in the mountains for a while, but this is the first hint of true fall down here. It made yesterday a great day to take a late afternoon nap in the cool overcast. Molly and I were batching it alone (What do you call it when a female dog is doing the equivalent of male batching? There must be a term for it.) so we had no trouble snuggling in an sleeping for a couple of hours. There is something about the time of year when a blanket becomes needful that makes sleeping so much better.

L and the Son are both up in the mountains with a cold/virus, so it might be a good thing that L wasn't able to come home this weekend. (I hope to avoid this cold if possible!) Add in the smoke and haze up there blowing in from the distant California fires and there is a lot of overcast and haze on the ground up there. Needless to say, it hasn't overjoyed L with the irritation it adds to the effects of the cold. The smoke doesn't seem to have made it over the mountains and down here in force yet, but there is a bit of haze in the air. It always amazes me how smoke from fires more than a 1000 miles away can appear in the air here. Let's hear it for the west to east flow of air in the U.S.

Enough about the weather and on with my rant for today.

Starting Saturday and continuing on through today, I have a gained a good argument against giving kids who are a bit young cell phones. A certain young gentleman who seems to have barely made it into his 4's has been calling repeatedly and inquiring for Marcus. On the times when I've answered and explained to the young man that this is not Marcus's number and suggested he might get his parents to help him find the right number, I've gotten a mumbled o'tay followed by a hangup. Of course within an hour or two there is another call from the same youngster on the same cell number asking for Marcus yet again.  I am tempted to call the number back around ten tonight in the hope it will be answered by the person or persons who gave the young man a phone too early in his life. I suspect it would do me no good since it seems that there are a number of parents who haven't thought through the issues of comprehension and phones for responsible use by youngsters. In a few days, he will undoubtedly tire and quit calling.

From my curmudgeonly point of view, if you are going to give a cell phone to a youngster too young to responsibly respond to messages when he uses the phone, you might want to set it up so it can call only the parents and maybe the siblings and grandparents. But that idea seldom seems to occur to the sort that might give a 4 year old a cell phone. If you are such a parent, you should consider what kind of emotional trauma might result to junior if he kept calling someone less tolerant than me for three days. If nothing else, he might gain some new and surprising vocabulary words for answering the phone.

Have you ever had the joy of a too young caller? How many 4 and 5 year olds do you know with cell phones?