I’m pretty sure I saw one of the worst cases of phone addiction ever this morning. I was out walking Ted the dog and stopped at the coffee shop with the good dog treats, where I had my cappuccino and spent a few minutes feeling superior, sketching my coffee cup in my notebook. This is a thing I do now to stop myself from doom-scrolling in the morning. Rather than taking out my phone and measuring how much closer we’ve crept to annihilation overnight, I draw my coffee cup.
I’m really bad at it and I’ll never get any better, but what the hell, it’s better than reading the news. So I’m standing there, doing my terrible little drawing and drinking my pretty good cappuccino, when I look at the building site next door and see the crane operator climbing the ladder into his cabin four or five stories above the ground. Except he wasn’t just climbing. He was also scrolling his phone.
He was already 30 or 40 feet up off the ground, and the dude’s checking his Instagram or something. I’m not quite sure how he was managing to climb with just one hand, because he never put that phone away and he never took his eyes off it. He was moving very smoothly up that ladder, which makes sense if he goes up and down it every day. He’s not a guy concerned by heights, and he’s got the muscle memory. But man, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody scrolling while doing something so madly dangerous.
I was almost tempted to take a photo of him, but then I thought no, the only reason you take that photo is to share it. And as soon as you share it, there’s a good chance you’d get that bloke sacked. So I just kept it to myself.
I can share the experience here though, if not the photo. I’m still shaking my head about it five hours later.