CT phone home

I was able to get by just fine without a cellular telephone during my first couple of months here. However, my co-teacher was insistent that I have one. Perhaps she was tired of trying to meet me at places where I would inevitably become lost, or maybe the strings of her heart were pulled a bit too taut after seeing the disgusted reactions from the other teachers, whenever they asked for my non-existent phone number. Whether it was out of pity, annoyance, or kindness, I'm grateful that my co-teacher helped me buy a phone.

In Korea, everyone has a cell phone. Nearly all of my students have them, and a large number of little elementary students have them too. I know this, because whenever they see me on the street, they pull out their phones and call their friends to report a Chris sighting. I'm pretty sure that their is some sort of tracking network going on for my whereabouts at all times.

So where do these young paparazzi get their phones? They are born with them. The phone is usually attached to the umbilical cord, but there have been some cases of it already being in the baby's hands when it enters this strange new world. This means that getting a phone can be a problem for a foreigner. My Canadian friend, Carl, had problems with stores closing early whenever he would walk in, or wanting ridiculously high-priced deposits. I was fortunate that my co-teacher knew how to find a phone shop and was able to haggle for me. I told her that I already had a phone and that it worked perfectly well for calling people back home and cracking open pine nuts here. She didn't agree and helped me get a new phone for $30 (they were out of the free models).


That's my new phone. I got the most basic one I could, but it can still do more than your phone can (if I knew how to work the thing, that is). I can listen to music on it, take pictures, use the internet, and I can even buy an extra antenna for it and watch TV on it. I see people on subway cars doing this every once in a while and it makes me feel like I've traveled into the future, and I mean more than the 16 hours from the change in time zones.

One of the students also gave me a little brown dangly ornament for my phone for Christmas. She told me that brown is a man color, and since I am a man, she got me a brown colored ornament. The powers of logical deduction are well alive in Korea. I'm thankful she got it for me. It's required by law that all residents must have an ornament on their phone. Being the upstanding citizen that I am, I plan on getting as many of these as possible. Like always, I'll be sure to keep you up to date on how that story unfolds.

I did make a good American half-hearted attempt at trying to learn how to use my phone. It came with a 121 page instruction book, that may have been in Korean, but it also had plenty of pictures for me to figure out the meaning.

For example, on this page I learned the valuable lesson of not putting my phone in the microwave. This was a close call as I was about to prepare my mushroom phone casserole in the microwave. Dogs shouldn't be using your cell phone either. The civilized dogs here all have their own special little clothes that they wear and I'm sure that they have their own dog phones as well.

Like little dogs, babies shouldn't use your phone either. While they are born with their own phones, they aren't allowed to use them until they're older because of the extravagant bills they rack up from their baby talk. One should also refrain from hammering their phone in order to fix it. It's very tempting, which makes me glad that I don't own a hammer.

From the first warning, you can see that you shouldn't look directly at your Medusa phone. I was dialing a whole lot of wrong numbers at first, but then I bought a nice pocket mirror from a friendly vendor on a subway car. The second picture is common sense, don't put your phone in a little box, but the other pictures were very helpful. Apparently, blowing up your phone with a bomb is just as bad as putting it in a microwave. In the last picture, if your phone has gone to hell, then don't use the skull spray on it. That just won't do.

Definitely, don't let your cell phone fly away. Don't let it wag its tail and become too spoiled neither. You must be fair and firm with it. Also, don't let it do art. It may seem creative, but it's not Jackson Pollock nor Michaelangelo, and it's just going to waste your nice materials.

As you can see, having a cell phone can be a big responsibility. I asked the other teachers about all of these warnings and they told me that it was for liability reasons. Besides the benefit of being able to get in touch with people through means other than random chance, I've learned that a lack of common sense isn't just a unique American trait, but that perhaps it is universal. Doing dumb things is something that links us as humans together and separates us from the animals (they usually are eaten if they make poor choices and are thus naturally selected against). We are fallible as humans and not as separate cultural entities, and we should forge our world bond on this principle and embracxe it.