In the ancient days, our forefathers developed elaborate communication systems such as smoke, drums, and messengers. People, then, understood what each smoke signal meant, although nowadays it means that someone is burning trash, of course when it is accompanied by a pungent smell of burning plastics. However, all these systems are obsolete, replaced by hallmarks of human advancement in communication matters-phones.
One of the baffling things about phones is that some people can completely function without them. Perhaps, a possible explanation would be that they have two faulty brain cells that are almost always jump-started by approximately 437 ml of fifth generation liquor. There isn’t single day a person can leave the house without the phone as it is one of the first things someone checks before he/she leaves their house.
A phone is the cheapest accessory one can have nowadays. There are some that go for as little as five hundred shillings. There’s no excuse one cannot be reached via a phone, although some have perfected a life of being completely free from it. These people function on intuition. Or guesswork. Which is always wrong because they have to spot someone’s car to know that they are around. But then how many of us have cars?
We’ve grown so attached to our phones. In fact, the first thing a visitor will do is scan the room for a place where to charge their phones. It worries us to death when our phones’ battery percentage begin showing in red (at least mine does). To waylay this worry, innovative people came up with power banks, but it is still a burden for plenty especially those who don’t carry handbags or any bag whatsoever.
As a modern-day affliction, our attachment to the phones sometimes doesn’t escape God’s watch. Once in a while, methinks, He brags to Satan how His man is attached to his Chinese gadget (for iPhone lovers, your gadgets are also made in China so don’t walk around thinking you’ve made it in life). And so god will converse with Satan:
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“Have you seen my man Brian, the way he loves his phone?” God says.
“Yeah, that creep calls himself al-Absurd on social media,”
“Well, that’s ridiculous, it’s a mockery of the genius he is,”
“He is a moron, just like a million others enslaved by the phone.’
“Can you do something about it?”
And so one fine morning, when you set out for an important mission, say in a part of the country that requires extensive use of the phone, you wake up the sad fact that you forget to switch on the socket the night before. Your mind goes rummages through a myriad of sins that you may have committed in the past, and you settle on the fact that you failed to forward those WhatsApp messages.
Although you have once wished the president dies, it falls way below the list of sins- it’s just a transgression. You begin contemplating telling whoever you were supposed to meet that you’ve been struck by a disease without a name, but then you are not the type to wish misfortune for yourself.
In the few remaining minutes, you turn the switch and even switch the phone off with the hope that it may charge faster. Twenty minutes of charging, you switch the phone on and realize that the battery level is less by one percent as at the time you charged it.