I had the pleasure of attending a Yuppie convention this past weekend - better known as the The Barclay’s Golf Tournament in the Posh NJ town of Ridgewood. Actually, that’s incorrect, it’s ‘Ridgewood Country Club’ in the not-as-exclusive town of Paramus. I suppose using the Ridgewood name is a clever ploy to charge more money. Vive le Capitalism.
As I made my way through General Parking to the nearest make shift tram, I was stopped by an archetypal Yuppie who advised that cell phones were not permitted. He wasn’t part of the staff, just a fellow groupie that was turned back at the gate for ‘carrying’. My first response to the small crowd was “Oh my god, how will I survive’. I said this more in mockery to illicit a chuckle (which it did), but part of me did fall into a momentary panic. What if I need to look something up on the internet? How will I text message my friends and family? What if there’s an emergency and not one of the other 100 Thousand spectators and staff could help me?
I’m not even sure how I didn’t see the Cell phone ban coming, if you’ve ever watched a tournament you know how deafly quiet it is when a Tour Player is in his backswing. Imagine Sergio Garcia slicing his drive into the woods after his concentration was disrupted by an obnoxiously loud polytonic rendition of fur elise. Anyway, after a friend and I literally stood there debating if we could beat the security check, we decided to heed his warning and begrudgingly return our lifelines to the safety of our vehicles.
Obviously, within minutes, my dependency on the charms of Blackberry faded and I was absorbed in the wonder and beauty of the event. As we made our way through the different holes I started to notice how pleasant it was. Not only wasn’t I incessantly checking my e-mail like a pavlovian test case, but no one around me had their nose buried in their handset, or chatted loudly on a superfluous call. More importantly, however, with large crowds moving about the grounds, nobody was distracted enough to cause foot traffic or general chaos. As much as I relished this, it seemed incomprehensible that our generation lived two decades without such modern technological conveniences.
I’m sure kids today think we’re part of the dark ages since we grew up withouth the Internet, Cell phones, and email. For the first time I think i’m turning into my dad; I can start a story to my young cousins with ‘when i was your age, we didn’t have email – We had to walk up hill both ways in the snow to a mailbox!’ *gasp*