Almost a Yuppie, or How I Nearly Bought a Cellphone (in 1986)

In this age of tweets, MP3s and the ubiquitous laptop, I cringe when people announce, sometimes pridefully, that they are "Luddites." Not the textile machinery-destroying kind, but the sort of person who, for whatever reason (fear of new technology, thriftiness, poverty or Brahman tendencies), doesn't have a cellphone, computer or television.

The word Luddite, in this context, makes me feel all the more uncomfortable, because, until recently, I sometimes used it to describe myself, and because I don't have a cellphone and I don't use Twitter or have a Facebook page.

But, once upon a time, twenty-some years ago - when it was still hip (and strictly a profession) to be a graphic designer and carry around a diamond plate aluminum Filofax in your vacuum-formed black plastic briefcase, while listening to The Durutti Column or The The on your Sony Walkman, on the tube commute to the West End (of London) - I did come close to buying an early British cellphone.

I remember poring through the lavish mobile telephone brochure at the big old kitchen table in my Balham house share. The phone was smallish, more reminiscent of the Sinclair calculator than the brick-like first-generation cellphones. It was also incredibly expensive (a couple of hundred pounds a month, if I remember rightly), with a short range and patchy signal quality.

I was freelancing at the time and making more money working a few hours a week than at the full-time design job I'd just quit, and about to be headhunted to an even better job, so I was feeling pretty flush, and leasing a mobile phone seemed like a savvy, even affordable, move for the graphic designer on the go.

In the end, though, I didn't get the phone but bought a flat in South London and a Bang and Olufsen TV instead (that's how expensive the phones were).

This pivotal decision not to get the ultimate personal communicator of the day was the beginning of my long slide into bohemian prioritization - a sort of materialistic triage, whereby you might look out your window at your $5000 car, for example, and realize that if you sold it you could afford to paint for the next six months.

By the late 1980s, I was no more the early-adopter, as I had been with the Walkman and VCR, in the early '80s. The more time I devoted to painting, and the further away I got from the Siren call of designer yuppiedom, the the less important certain technologies, particularly communication technologies - i.e. ways in which people can get a hold of you when you'd rather be working on something of your own or just quietly staring into space - became to me.

To be continued.

Pic from GagetyNews.com. My (almost) first cellphone is second from left.