Since 1997, the date I officially joined the internet, the longest I have stayed
without checking my email was five days: This was when my mother had
her cataract operation in her right eye and I had to nurse her for five days
at the village house which is devoid of internet. There is an internet café
somewhere in the village, but I rarely visit because going there is pointless
unless it is raining – this is when the snails come out to carry the pace of the
connection.
So I returned to no less than 32 emails, none of them being a joke – a friend
even sent a postcard from Nevada making sure I was still alive: Five days of
no-hearing from me was unheard of. I am on of those people who check their
emails every two and a half second, and I experience withdrawal symptoms
when the habit of clicking and dragging is not fed without interruption.
But of course, all of this started with much apprehension from my part – I
am such a technophobe that when my cell phone was stolen recently and I
went to the shop to get a new one, the shop assistant asked me what features
I wanted and so I replied: “I want it to ring, and then I press a button and I
hear the other person’s voice.” – he smiled handing me a piece of technology
I manipulated as if it was a mousetrap and then he added softly: “I am sorry,
this one has inbuilt text messaging in it, they don’t come without it anymore.
But you can ignore that function.”
Yet, when I embrace change I do it wholeheartedly, and so in the span of a
few days I was already mastering email use – though not internet because
I had bought the pay-as-you-go internet card and four hours could last me
months if I worked everything offline and just connected only when I wanted
to send, whereas internet was time spent recklessly – on a program called
“Eudora.”
Apparently, Stever Dorner who came up with the program, actually called
it after southern writer Eudora Welty after reading her story “Why I live at
the post office.” Strange, I never met Eudora when I lived at the post office
either. When I was a student at AUB, the agriculture department was on the
base of the somehow cascaded campus, whereas the post office was right on
top next to Bliss street and yet, and whenever I had two free minutes I’d do
all the trip – including climbing the stairs of the chemistry department (102
steps, someone counted them) – to be able to check my inbox.
Of course, most of the time it was empty and I always had this fantasy of
going there, opening box#1332 and finding – no, not a letter – but the hand
of the post office manager inserting the letter there and so I’d have it right off
his hand, hot from the oven as they say.

For a long time, just like email, I resisted the idea of having a cell phone.
Many people, including clients, would call home where a message would be
left with mother. Incidentally, many assumed she was my secretary because
they thought that a high profile consultant must have left his office (not
home) phone number as a means of contact.
Yet, came a time where I had to embrace change and so I got myself a
mobile. And this is when another drama started to unfold. It was not uncom-
mon for me to look at the device and try to mentally control it with “ring,
ring”… And it wouldn’t ring of course, primarily because I had just acquired
the number and no one knew it apart from me. I subscribed to one of the
two companies providing lines back them to a program which cost seventy
Dollars every two months, in exchange of which the user is provided with
one hundred and eighty units – each one being a minute – and the ability to
recharge the line with more of these units when the deadline came.
And so my temporary line, ended up being my fixed as that number ended up
being recharged for a great number of times. Until that is, I traveled to Saudi
Arabia to work there and ended up giving the whole instrument to my brother
– which was a very smart move as a lot of people kept calling me on that
number, and my brother just reported these phone calls something impossible
to do when your number ends up with a stranger.
As a matter of fact, upon returning from Saudi Arabia a year and half later,
I got myself another one of those temporary-yet-forever-renewed numbers.
The shop in question offered me two options: One number was something
like 998877 which was sleek and easy to remember and the other one was a
complete mess and a jumble to remember. Obviously, I picked the second.
As soon as I laid my hand on it, the obsessive behavior started creeping back
again, looking at it to ring from the very first hour. The problem was: It did
ring. It was my brother playing a trick on me, calling me from his own mo-
bile and then hanging up. And he did so as we walked alongside one another
returning home from the shop.
And it worked, because my first reflex was: Oh someone remembered me!
And it would be him. And he would repeat it again, and again (four times as
a matter of fact) and I fell for it every time.
Cell phone address book, just like the one in the email, is serious business: I
only added numbers or emails of people whom I cared about. I was blessed
with a memory to cut diamonds on since I was a child, and so I rarely needed
to register any number. I had it all in my head, and so marking someone’s
coordinates was much more like signing a pact rather than keeping reference
for future contact.

But that fact became of little importance the day my mobile phone got stolen.
On that famous day, I had a busy schedule which sometime around noon,
included AUB and another client further to the Jnah area. I left AUB and got
up to Hamra street to fetch a “service”, strangely it was a sleek new Renault
Megane that stopped. I hesitated before going, as I had no intention of paying
more than a couple of thousand Lebanese pounds – the equivalent of 1,33
USD – to go there and taxis were commonly charging sever or eight dollars
for the same trip. Service cars, which of course doubled as taxis, were shabby
Mercedes cars dating back to the seventies, scotched up together after years
of service and one would often end up being suffocated by the fumes of un-
cooperative engine or by the sauna worthy heat inside the passenger compart-
ment because the windows don’t work.
And yet, there it was: A metallic grey year-model Renault picking me up.
The driver immediately justified: “I just took someone on a taxi ride from
Achrafieh to Hamra, and since I am picking up someone from the Marriott
hotel in Jnah might as well pick you up.” We chatted along the road and
when I got to the client, I paid him and went out.
Upon going, my reflex was to check if I had everything in pocket – wallet,
cell phone… Cell phone? Where is the cell phone? I rumbled every pocket I
had and I couldn’t find it.
I went into the building and immediately called my number from someone
else’s cell. It rang, and rang… Then ten seconds later I called again, this time
the line was off. I was screwed.
My reflex started working overtime and I ended up deciding to call the cus-
tomer service department of the mobile company. In order to block the line
and therefore be able to keep the number I had to provide five phone num-
bers I have called recently – the trick was that if I called someone and hung
up (Making a “missed call”) it wouldn’t count.
That was easy I though, five phone numbers from the top of my head. And
so I started enumerating, first one – my mother’s was OK (Ever since my
brother traveled to the US he gave her his phone number) – the second, my
other brother’s phone was also OK (He had my previous number and so it
was easy to remember it) – and then things went wrong: Every other number
I gave was a number I hadn’t call. Apparently, I was going through some in-
troverted stage where I wasn’t calling anyone of my friends and so the recent
history of my phone was devoid of all the numbers I had easily, yet purpose-
lessly, memorized.

After much soul searching I ended up giving the complementary numbers – I
had called a TV station from my cell to their landline asking for footage for a
documentary I was working on, and then I remembered that I had called the
dean of the faculty I teach in, and I asked a cousin for a favor not a long time
ago. And so I kept the number eventually, but I did press charges to cover my
back: In times where mobile phones were used in terrorist activities, I had to
report the serial number of the machine (Which was luckily found on the box
it came in, and which I had kept to store some oddities in).
Sometime later, I got a phone call from the Internal Security Forces telling
me to show up as the machine was eventually traced. I had to confront the
shop owner who bought it. As I went into the room, I started fishing for the
potential suspect who – even though most likely it was not him who stole
the phone – he actually bought the hot commodity. No one fit the mean-man-
buying-stolen-goods description. There was a blind beggar with a several-
days beard who was arrested for soliciting, a woman for prostitution (though
she was so awfully looking, I wonder why anyone would pay to sleep with
her), and a young man wearing decent clothes and a worried look.
The gendarme then took me to confirm my story and then told me that the
young man, in his early twenties, was actually the shop owner who bought
the device. He also told me that the guy was proposing three solutions: Either
give me some cash of the same value of the stolen phone, or give me a free
one from his shop, or leave it up to me to decide what I wished to be com-
pensated.
The young man and myself started talking and I felt myself in a position of
power. I was robbed, yes, but was also able to get this done with and come
out as a gentleman. I mean let’s face it, I love my old cell phone mostly
because it had a sleek design, but its battery was going dead, it was having
scratches from so much nasty falls, and was having reception problems. He
probably bought it for ten bucks or so.
So I started chit chatting, lecturing him that it wasn’t smart for him to buy
cell phones which were stolen, to which he defended himself saying it was
the worker in his shop who got it and didn’t ask for an ID like he was sup-
posed to when he bought it. I insisted that an student in engineering – a tidbit
I had picked up along the sides of the conversation – should be more wary
and whatnot.
The gendarme started getting a little impatient and jumped into the conversa-
tion asking me how I wanted the issue settled.

I told him that I already bought a new phone and showed it to them – which
dramatically failed to impress anyone because it was the cheapest most basic
model in the market – and that my client data was lost anyway (I couldn’t tell
them I memorized number, I had to be dramatic). And so the best thing for
everyone involved was to drop the whole thing all while advising the engi-
neering student for the last time to be more alert.
I felt good, not like those women in infomercials who I-feel-good-about-my-
self but in a more discreet way. One that was a little narcissistic and patroniz-
ing. Upon going out of the room, I noticed the blind man being accompanied
by an uneven-legged woman who was more clutching to him than vice versa.
His wife probably, as she seemed as destitute and poor as he was. Instead of
going left out of the police station to get a cab leading me for the rest of my
appointment of the day, I followed them as they headed right. I caught up with
them fast – which didn’t require much effort, after all he was blind and she
was limping. “Do you have enough money to go back home?”
“No, we’ll walk.”
“Here.” And handed her the equivalent of eight Dollars.
Story of my life, I thought. I would deny myself using a taxi for that same
sum to make it to an urgent meeting, preferring to wait under the piercing sun
for a “taxi” (To which I sometimes say in a tempting way “servicein” – which
means “two service” or double the fare), and yet would give it gladly to some-
one who needed it.
I had much trouble one time getting to spend a hundred Dollars, as I thought
that as soon as I am going to break it into smaller pieces I would end up
spending all that money on nonsense. But when I learned that a friend of mine
was jobless, I invited him for a cup of coffee and gave him the bill without
thinking twice saying that he’d give it back to me from his first paycheck.
I have always been cheap in many ways on myself. I would frequently visit
the shop several times before buying something as basic as a T-shirt. But
when it comes to other people, sometimes perfect strangers, my altruism
would open like the Nile did to Moses.
Old habits are hard to die I suppose, I just got a button on my shirt fixed at a
tailor’s store, I gave the lady a two Dollar tip, the same amount I spared by
not taking the bus the other day when I strayed from home during an outing
the other day, one that went a little far after a wrong turn.