Melville Cooke
I FINALLY figured out the real use of cellular phones over the past week and a half, somewhere between Sting in Portmore on Boxing Day and the Original Dancehall Jam Jam in Clarendon on New Year's Eve.
With the fascinating situation of having nearly as many cellular phone users as its population, in Jamaica the cellular phone has many uses, actually talking about something significant being one of the least important. There is 'flossing', as in showing off and being 'smaddy' (of course, a cheap cellie will just not do; you have to be on the cutting edge, razor-like, if you will). Conferencing with that is the announcement of status, although the same situation with cars and rims often obtains with cell phones; just as the poorest person has the flashiest rims on his/her car, the truly wealthy tend to have a regular cellphone (if you ever see it, anyway).
So a flip just has to be the way to go, no matter that you hear no darned better than a 'non-flip'.
Another use is just having something to do, to appear cool, appropriately uninterested in and aloof from the infernal lumpen. Hence the 'hotties' step out of the vehicle, do the quick scan under the false eyelashes, through the coloured contact lens, to make sure that they are being eyed for opportunities by the foxes and threats by fellow vixens, saunter on impossibly high, thin heels to wherever they are making an appearance (which can be the onion shelf at the supermarket as well as a club) and 'flip' out the cellie, literally and figuratively. They tap the keys with OPF (other people's fingernails), using said OPF to occasionally brush OPH from their faces (hey, have you ever noticed that people who wear false hair touch it very often, as if to make sure it is still in place?) and do whatever the hell it is they find so interesting on that little screen.
For those of you who do not go to large outdoor concerts of the Sting and Jam Jam kind, a really cool use of the 'cellie' is to give a 'forward' for a song or performer. (And I will not explain what a forward is; as hard as some of you pretentious folk try to remain 'neutral' about dancehall and reggae or even try to 'reverse' its progress, I know you damned well and know what a 'forward' is.) Seeing the mass of lit cellphones held high in the air is truly a wonderful sight, especially when it is for something as significant as Mr. Vegas' minute of silence at Sting 2005 for a six-year-old girl who was raped and killed in downtown Kingston.
RUMOURS
I have heard rumours about uses of the vibrating function the manufacturers did not intend, but I am yet to confirm first-hand from someone who has utilised the cellie as such. Of course, the shrinking sizes could cause some 'loss of signal' problems.
On the actual communication side of things, the cellphone does not have to be used for talking, as there is that 'please call me' text 'thingy'. And with people being able to add credit from ABMs, it has become a good way to get to the lady of your dreams. "Yu know sey Mikey love me? 'Im sen' on a bills credit y'nuh," says hottie from a couple paragraphs above.
Then she uses it to call Trevor.
Seriously, though, the true purpose of a cellphone is to give the sense of being in touch with somebody, or, more accurately, to give the sense of being able to be in touch with somebody in what I believe is a more impersonal, hustle and bustle society. That little piece of electronic wizardry gives us the sense that we matter, that the more numbers we have in our address book the more we have a place in the scheme of things. A missed call is a reason for rejoicing, no calls is a cause for sorrow.
I guess the cost of the phone and the credit are small prices to pay to avoid loneliness, as fleeting, and a fragile as the flipping feeling of companionship is.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
