By Rick Kaempfer
From the June 2006 issue of SHORE MAGAZINE (www.visitshoremagazine.com)
I’ve probably seen that Nokia commercial now a hundred times. You know which one I’m talking about—the one where the woman says the final step in breaking up with her boyfriend is the moment she deletes him from her cell-phone. Something about that commercial has bothered me since the first time I saw it, but it wasn’t until today that I realized what it was.Granted, I’ve been married for fifteen years, and haven’t broken up with someone in almost twenty years, but it seems to me that one little beep is hardly grounds for feeling such a great sense of satisfaction. It’s empty. Not much to it. Just a simple beep doesn’t say “See you never, loser!” to me.
It got me to thinking about the ways breaking up has changed over the past few years thanks to technology. The whole dynamic is different now. You can judge for yourself if the new dynamic is better, worse, or about the same.
Then: Put all of her pictures in a pile, and set them on fire; watching her face melt, blacken, turn into ash, and evaporate into dust.
Now: Click, highlight, and delete her photos from your hard-drive.
Then: Driving past his house and throwing microwaved tomatoes at it.
Now: Sending a digital photo to his cell-phone—of you giving him the finger.
Then: Having to make one last visit to her apartment to get all your records back.
Now: Sending an e-mail asking her to e-mail your music back to you.
Then: Risking it all by listening to the radio after the break up, knowing that at any moment the DJ could inadvertently play “your” song.
Now: I-Pod, baby. Either delete “your” song entirely, or don’t use the shuffle feature for a few months—just in case.
Then: Driving by to see if her lights are on.
Now: Using a scanner to listen in on the baby monitor.
Then: Sending him a pizza at 3 in the morning.
Now: Sending him a computer virus at any time.
Then: Re-reading her love letters from a happier time, glossing over the bad times and only remembering the good times.
Now: Looking at your cell-phone bill and tracking the memory of each call…she loved me, she started to get irritated with me, she told me I was a jerk, she broke up with me, she told me that if I ever called her again she would get a restraining order.
Then: Reliving the grief a million times each time an unsuspecting friend asks how he is doing.
Now: Emergency IM session with a few hundred friends—all at once.
Then: You can’t even recognize her face on those deteriorating old “Private Polaroid’s.”
Now: “Ex-Girlfriend” websites can give her the kind of world-wide audience she never expected.
Then: Throwing all of his belongings onto the front lawn.
Now: Selling all of his belongings on E-bay.
Then: Using the remote code to check her answering machine messages while she’s at work, only to hear her new boyfriend’s voice on the machine.
Now: Checking her cell-phone voicemail and deleting messages from her new boyfriend before she can hear them.
See what I mean? The whole world of break ups has drastically changed. Also, it occurs to me some of the old classics have been destroyed by technology forever. For instance, in the old days you could call a million times waiting for that one chance to get her on the line. Now, with caller I.D, automatic callback, and privacy manager, you would be exposed as the psycho boy you really are. Also, you can’t use her phone number when you contribute to a charity anymore. What’s the use of getting her number on every single telemarketer’s phone list when she’s on the national no-call list?
Sigh. Oh well, I guess time marches on.
On the other hand, now that I’ve given the subject more extensive thought, I know what the woman from the Nokia commercial should do to get a little more forceful closure. She could take the best of then and now, mix them together, and create a really satisfying break up stew.
For instance, what if she printed up his digital pictures before she deleted them so she could burn them too? I think one or two toner cartridges is a small price to pay for the satisfaction of watching his face melt.
Or, what if she sent a digital picture of herself throwing microwaved tomatoes to his cell-phone? She would need a friend to help with this, but let’s face it—all of her friends probably hated him anyway. Hearing that old fashioned tomato splat is well worth the trouble of a coordinated photo assault (or so I’ve read).
Or, what if she sent him a pizza at 3 a.m. while she e-mailed him a computer virus? That would allow her to wake him up on a work night AND destroy his most expensive belonging without leaving the comfort of her home.
I know she seems pretty content in the commercial after she hears that little beep, but whatever happened to “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?”
I guess I’m just a hopeless old romantic.
See some of my other published magazine pieces here: http://publishedclips.blogspot.com
