PCBEEUSA - Freedom on the Web

I read an article the other day where a man was showing off his Blackberry handheld to the friends over lunch. Suddenly, he felt a vibration at this side. He reached down for the Blackberry that was not there; his friends were looking at it.

And I thought it was only me. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=3740984&page=1

Apparently many people have felt these “phantom vibrations” for years. Some claim they are akin to “phantom limb syndrome” where a person who has had an arm or leg amputated still feel the sensations, as if the limb were still there. Your cell phone or PDA becomes, in effect, a part of you. Take it away, and you still experience it.

Until recently, I had a T-Mobile phone that rang with their trademark 5-tones. Even when I had the thing, I would jump when I would hear other phones ringing or even TV commercials. Now, though I no longer have the phone, I hear, and react to the tones– even when they are not really there. Sometimes it is something that sounds similar; sometimes it is just in my head. That phone had become part of me, and I still experienced it, even thought it had been “amputated.”

I am not a big fan of cell phones and connected PDAs. Not because of any perceived technological danger. Almost 30 years ago, I had a job where I was essentially on 24-hour call. As the company grew and had more systems installed, the probability of getting after hour calls increased exponentially. It got to the point where every conceivable activity had been, at some point, interrupted by that damned pager. While in church or in the movies, I would set the thing to vibrate, and I would jump when it would go off. They only time I did not carry the pager would be while I was on vacation or on weekends, and still, I would be sitting, having dinner out with my family, having left the pager at home, and I would jump because I felt a vibration.

As we become more and more dependent on technology, the more these strange effects are going to be seen.

Sometimes, it is just weird.

I was at work one day, several years ago, when all of a sudden; I started to hear this faint, very high pitch sound. I occasionally suffer from a ringing of the ears, tinnitus, as it is called, but this was different. In fact after a few minutes, it became clear that my co-workers were hearing it also. This was an electronics repair facility so, we assumed that some test equipment had gone flaky, but, after we shut everything down, the noise was still there. I went into the next room. The sound was there, as strong as ever. When returned to the repair shop, they were staring at me, wide-eyed. They told me that the noise went away when I left the room–and came back with me.

For a moment, I freaked. I had been reading of bizarre conditions where people with tinnitus had it so bad that others could hear it, or people mysteriously generating sounds from inside their bodies, and nothing could be done about it. I began to imagine that I was going to go through the rest of my life dealing with some crazy, untreatable condition.

That’s when I thought to look at my digital watch. When I removed the battery, the sound went away. I put the battery back in and the watched ran perfectly for years afterward.

Post a Comment