Ode to Overhead Phone Conversations
“If he is expecting other people to change their lives based on his direction then that is really invasive. I’m all for anyone who wants to change their own lives and serve as a role model for others. But he can’t change other people, that’s just a simple fact.”
While shopping for late night essentials at a local grocery store, I could not help but overhear this cell phone conversation from the lady in the aisle next to me. She seemed to be chanting some song regarding his experiences and reactions to some unknown listener on the other side? A parent maybe? Or another close friend?
“It seems to me like you seem to know how I feel better than I know. And maybe I don’t even know what I feel.”
This was from another guy about forty or so the same night, outside the casino I visited at 11pm(it was the only place I could think of to walk so late at night as thunderstorm clouds loomed overhead and those grocery stores were soon now closed). Maybe I could more easily guess who his conversation was to?
It reminded me of a similar song overheard almost thirty years earlier, from a man sitting at a pay phone outside some steak house in Wisconsin where my family and I dined.
“It’s not that I don’t care how you feel. It’s that you tell me I can’t get how you feel and then that makes me feel inept at caring.”
My siblings, parents, and I could not stop laughing and joking all the way back to the hotel. The food(and extra entertainment) was so good we decided to eat there again the next night. This time a different guy was on the phone in a much less revealing conversation, asking simply “what time should we get there in the morning to start work.”
Cell phone conversations have been a hot key means of communication for decades now. Their counterpart landline, payphone, and older counterparts have been around even for a century and a half. And this is before we even consider cyberspace, social media, or the internet of smart things. In 1929, telegrams peaked at 200 million sent per year. Each year, humans now make trillions of phone calls.
Overhearing phone conversations late at night is humorous and entertaining. But it can also be a beacon of hope and deeper meaning.
For one, people communicating through any means of technology(whether phone, internet, smart devices, or even analog devices) can be seen as connecting them to the dimension of what is timeless and immeasurable. Those most personal of diatribes thoughtlessly spewed in public view not only stay in the memories of passerbys. How many of our most sacrosanct of conversations carry much farther through radio waves to dissipate to far reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere? Might some of our conversations by phone, internet, or social media even make it into space to then continue on forever?
Additionally, is it not wonderful in many ways that humans use any new gizmos from ever-advancing technology to keep up with the same constant rituals? We are still spewing our deeper selves into little plastic contraptions and public places just as much as we are blaring out social media posts and online video mantras. Yes, there may be countless automated bots and artificial intelligence mimicking our every move. But in innumerable ways, the most sophisticated of technology can hardly come close to the movements of us unboundedly complex humans. Remember the fact that it is humans who are behind the training and advancement of any artificial intelligence systems, as one of my conversations with an AI chatbot revealed:
AI systems could generate slightly different answers based on different training?
Yes, that’s correct. Other AI language models trained on different datasets and using different architectures may generate slightly different answers to the same question. This is because the training data and architecture used to train an AI language model can influence the patterns in the language that the model learns, which can in turn affect the responses it generates to questions.
Yes, it can be entertaining and humorous to hear some random person publicly crooning out their heart’s deeper notes to some faraway listener in their cell phone. Such experiences may also be aggravating(better than if they are trilling away while driving). Maybe next time I hear such a public melody I should ask if I can chime in? But of course, that is somehow considered intrusive?
