the timboucher experience

I warned you all I was gonna do it. And this afternoon, I finally did it. I smashed my cell phone. I seriously brutalized it.

But let me start at the beginning though.

I called Verizon by dialing 611 on my cell phone around 3:15pm. I navigated through the phone tree by pressing “4″ for more options and then “2″ for account cancellation. My mood was nervous. I spoke with an operator after a brief wait and asked her cordially how much it would cost for me to cancel my wireless account.

$175.

I pointed out that I’d read online at MSNBC that Verizon started a new deal for its customers where they prorate the cancellation fee if you’ve been with them for a while, so you don’t have to pay as much as somebody who cancels right away. Lucky for me, I don’t qualify for that because I got my phone before that policy took effect. Which is ironic in more ways than I can count.

My response to her though was a simple, “Hmm… I’m not sure that makes a lot of sense.”

I managed to get psyched out of my plan by hearing that high number and told her I had to “think about it more.” As soon as I hung up the phone though, I realized I really didn’t need to think about it any more. I’d been thinking about it for over a week and was more than convinced. Just as a last measure though, I did a quick calculation to see how many months of my regular bill (just under $60 a month) would equal this significantly larger cancellation fee. And it was about three months equivalent, I realized. But the thing is, after that I wouldn’t have to pay them another red cent and they could go fuck themselves.

I called back with much greater determination this time and announced my desire to terminate my line of service. I got a different operator this time, this one much more emotionally engaging. She put on an act about how disappointed and surprised she (as an avatar of Verizon) was that I would be cancelling my account. She asked me why I wanted to cancel and I was tempted to announce my plan to smash my phone with a giant rock in my back yard and to free my self once and for all from the electronic leash I carried around my neck.

But I thought better of it and said I just didn’t need it anymore. When pressed again later on on the subject, I also pointed out how dissatisfied I was with their whole policy of not guaranteeing reception in doors. She tried to convince me to start some kind of “trouble ticket” to take care of the problem. I said I wasn’t interested. She wanted me to maintain emergency service - at only $15 a month (whoowee! being scared is such a bargain!) - but I immediately declined.

The call ended without much fanfare and my service terminates in a couple days at the close of my next billing cycle. Right after that, I marched myself over to Skype, where I signed up for a VOIP phone number for three months for only 10 bucks, made sure that was working, and then emailed all my friends with my new number and status as one of the few, the proud, the brave without a cell phone. I then spent a couple minutes importing the phone numbers that I still want into my Skype account.

After that, I stripped off all my clothes and began meditating on what a cell phone was and why I wanted to destroy it. I had actually broken it all down into some neat wordplay recently that goes something like this… “Cell phone” if you say it fast could easily be heard as “self-phone,” which makes sense since it is a technological device hooked into our very notions of self-hood (which I have been exploring in some depth lately). You can also break that down into “self-one” - the idea that the self is a fixed and unitary entity, which I no longer believe it to be. It is instead, something more like a process or vortex, a locus point, a location where streams of reality converge, an ecology.

I examined the culturally-instilled and corporate-inspired fears I held over the possible loss of my cell phone, with regards to personal security and social isolation. I broke down the word “alienation” into the words “alien nation” and reflected to what extent that this represents what we’ve really become, and how we are addictively using technology to patch together a leaking hole in the ark we’re all riding on.

When I was done and had reached a calm state with everything, I put my clothes back on, but put them on backwards in a symbolic effort to thwart my regular conception of myself and to confuse the “Matrix” even further as to what my purposes and goals would be by actively flouting convention and my old patterns of behavior. I then covered my face with a bandana, put on gloves and a hat so that I was completely covered from head to foot and my features were physically unidentifiable.

I took the phone out back among a bunch of big rocks in my back yard by the fence and opened it up to make one last call. The call was to my self - to my new voicemail number, so that I could record and face the death of those things which had become associated with that device, that “self-phone.” I put the phone down while it was still recording and hoisted a large rock up in both hands over my head and then brought it down rapidly in a dramatic smash.

The feelings flowing through me at that moment were indescribable and powerful. I began to feel shaky inside, and nervous and extremely happy and also powerful. It was a strange and exhilirating mix as I brought the rock down again and again onto the helpless phone. Within two hits, the phone broke into two pieces, a screen and a keypad. Within two more, the battery popped out the back and I hit it a few times specifically until it started smoking and smelling funny, at which point I thought it would be a good idea probably to concentrate my efforts elsewhere, lest I end up with some kind of crazy chemical explosion on my hands. I smashed up the screen and keypad a bunch more until I was sure the thing was totally “dead.”

Here are some pictures I took immediately afterwards of the empty stinking husk that was left. My camera is extremely low quality and it was getting dark, so I had to bump up the brightness and resolution to make things visible at all. I then desaturated and ended up with some pretty neat looking photos, I think.

More comments on the other side of these pictures…

So yeah, then I threw the screen and keypad from the phone into the garbage by my house, but the battery was still smoking. I thought it would probably be irresponsible to throw it into some garbage bin while it was still in that state though. So I did the only logical thing I could think of: I buried it in the damp dirt about four inches down and covered it. I wasn’t quite sure what would be the best thing to do at this point, but figured the dirt would help prevent any kind of oxygen getting to it and blowing up or something. And who knows if that makes sense scientifically, but I left it for about 45 minutes and when I went back to check on it, it had cooled significantly and stopped smoking altogether. So it seems to have worked.

Then I spent some time fixing up the photos and also figuring out how to set up Skype to enable me to download my voicemail I left during the whole thing so you all could hear it here. It worked and I present the recording to you to listen to below. The only thing I’m disappointed about is that you can’t actually hear any of the smashing. I assume because the first blow took out the phone pretty sufficiently and probably disabled any recording capacity immediately. Odd though is that the recording itself lasted for 53 seconds, and much of it is silence. Perhaps it could be described as an eerie silence. I’m not sure why it didn’t just hang up sooner than that or what it thought it was recording, but I guess that’s one of the mysteries we’ll have to endure for the rest of our lives.

Enjoy!

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