Cell Phone Zombies

I just finished reading Stephen King’s horror novel Cell.  It’s a frightening tale of the near future in which a mysterious pulse turns cell phone users into mindless zombies.  At the terrifying climax the zombies herd the heroes into an abandoned building and then …

WARNING:  The following description contains concepts and images dangerous to anyone with a heart condition, a weak stomach, an aversion to mathematics, is pregnant or may become pregnant or anyone who is related to someone with these ailments.

At the terrifying climax, the zombies herd the heroes into an abandoned building and force them to make sense of a cell phone bill!  Shared minutes?  Are those the times someone felt particularly close to their phone?  Rollover minutes?  Something for cell-owning dogs, perhaps?  In network?  Out of network?  Regular Roaming?

I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what happens.  Let’s just say the word “overcharged” gets used a lot and I’ll never look at a cell phone salesman the same way again.

What made the novel especially scary was that it’s already starting to come true.  People who use cell phones are already turning into brainless, thoughtless zombies.  Oh sure, they don’t prey on the flesh of the living, but that might be preferable to what they are actually doing.

Let me tell you an absolutely true story that happened to my own personal family in Yellowstone National Park.

We had traveled to the park to see it’s most famous landmark, the Gift Shop.  I’m kidding, of course, everyone knows you can see Gift Shops anywhere.  We went to see Old Faithful which is only in Yellowstone.

For those of you who slept through the film they showed about Yellowstone in the fifth grade, Old Faithful is a geyser that erupts like clockwork every sixty or ninety minutes depending on the height of the last eruption, the number of tourists present, and the geyser’s mood.  Watching it is like seeing what would happen if you hooked up your bathtub drain backwards and shot hot water through it. 

We checked the prediction for the next eruption and found we had just enough time to buy the required “Go Geyser” pennants and ball caps.  Eager to see the awesomeness of nature (and deterred from getting too close by the posted DANGER signs and the beefy Park Ranger) we settled in and found ourselves sitting next to a force even more destructive than superheated steam … a Cell Phone Zombie.

We didn’t recognize her for what she was because while we waited she sat quietly and stared out at the little wisps of steam which signaled the fact that the geyser was somewhere in the locker room getting ready to come out.  At the first jet of water, CPZ Woman pulled out her phone and dialed.  You might think she wanted to share the the moment with someone else.  You might think that — if you had pudding for brains.

She wanted to complain about the hotel she had stayed at the night before.

Some poor soul answered and CPZ Woman launched into a long story about how she’d left her credit card at the hotel and they’d lost it and she had get the whole bus to go back and …
She continued speaking for five solid minutes without pausing for breath.  I can only assume that the person on the other end was a quadriplegic who couldn’t hang up and just had to listen.

While she babbled the geyser grew taller and taller.  Now that I think about it, maybe the geyser was actually powered by her mouth.  If she hadn’t talked I might be there still waiting to see the eruption.

As she wound down, the plume lowered.  And, here’s the scary part, she said, “Oh, it looks like something’s happening.  I’ve go to go.”

She hung up and the eruption ended.

“That’s it?” she asked, incredulous.

The people who had brought camcorders no doubt had a permanent record of her conversation and they didn’t look too happy about it.  Families that had traveled thousands of miles would forever remember Old Faithful as the place where they heard the story of the lost credit card.  As we exchanged glances I could tell we had the same thought.

If the Park Ranger wasn’t here we’d push CPZ Woman right into the mouth of the geyser.

Of course that would be wrong.  There are signs which explicitly warned about littering and putting unnatural objects in the geysers.

Cell Phone Zombies don’t have to speak to be annoying.  The modern cell phone provides lots of ways to tick off people without moving your lips.  I encountered another CPZ at a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

We settled into our balcony seats as the lights dimmed.  Ten minutes into the play, just when most the audience was remembering that they’d read Midsummer in high school and didn’t understand it then either, a woman two rows down flipped open her phone.  The LCD screen blazed like a pimple on a debutant’s nose.  I thought the woman would put the phone away when she realized how bright it was.

I had pudding for brains.

She started playing Tetris.  The only way for me to block the phone from my sight was to cross my legs and hold my foot at just the right angle.  My plan was to talk to her at intermission, but by then my leg had cramped and I lost the power of locomotion.  So I was forced to hold the position during the second half of the play.
When Puck finally started talking about “If we spirits have offended…” I wanted to grab the woman and hurl her off the balcony.  Except, of course, the Park Ranger would have stopped me.

I know why Stephen King wrote his book.  It was a warning, but I’m afraid it comes too late for most Americans.  The Cell Phone Zombies are already among us.