Several times, I’ve sat on planes next to people using cell phones. Usually men, usually suits or hipsters, usually with smartphones, texting or chatting or browsing during the takeoff, during the flight, and during the landing. I’m sure it doesn’t actually affect the plane that much (see Mythbusters episode), but on the chance that it might, I would feel a little better if people didn’t check their emails for the 10 minutes during takeoff and landing at least. My new policy is to say something to the person. Honestly, my main reason is that I think the people who do this are generally arrogant asshats.

A few days ago, on a flight to Baltimore, there was a man sitting next to me; on takeoff, his phone rang loudly. He picked up mid-ascent and said “I can’t talk, I’m on a plane.” He then closed the clamshell and stuffed it into his pocket. I made nothing of it until, during the descent into BWI, his phone rang loudly again. Several passengers around me looked at our row, alarmed. The man pulled it out, looked at the caller ID, and closed the clamshell. Seconds later, it rang loudly again.

I looked over at the man. ‘What an asshat,’ I thought.
“Sir,” I said, “I think you have to turn off your cell phone.”
“It is off,” he replied.
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
“Yes it is,” he said.
“No, I’m pretty sure it isn’t,” I said. He paused.
“Really?” he asked. He pulled out the cell phone. He flipped open the clamshell, and the Verizon logo splashed onto the screen. He looked at me, and I realized he had no idea that his phone was actually still on.
“Yeah,” I said, “you have to turn the whole phone off.”
“How?” he asked. He peered at the phone.
“Here,” I said, taking the phone. “You press down and hold this button until it goes off.” I powered off the phone.
“Oh, okay,” he said, smiling. “I bet you can tell I’m not good with this technology stuff.”
“No problem,” I said. “You just hold down that same button to turn it on again.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

Guess: store, context.

Hypothetical, straight from Reddit: what is the one skill you could not live without? The original question was, “what is the one skill you’re amazed other people do not possess?” That seems a bit derogatory, though; some of the responses involved people who didn’t know how to light a match or perform mental spatial manipulation, etc. Some of the examples were amusing (inability to cut food, for instance), but I then again I used to think that people who couldn’t drive were weird, at least until I met some New Yorkers.

One skill that came up a lot was reading, and I think I’d go with that. For one, I can’t think of too many jobs that don’t require some basic level of reading (even identifying labels, for instance). Also, reading enables the learning of other skills–a meta-skill?

What one skill could you not live without?

Let’s call the whole thing off.

I bought a new wallet at the bookstore. Like my old wallet, this is a leather ID holder, stuffed with credit cards and club cards and IDs and the odd dollar bill. Clipped inside is a compact Zebra pen, and a thick proximity card sits on the outside. Like my old wallet, a metal grommet holds my keys: car, apartment, deadbolt, office, building, bicycle, lab, mailbox. I use a carabiner to clip the assemblage to my belt, and as a result I jingle like a janitor when I walk.

My old wallet, after being emptied out, resembled a deflated, mummified stomach. The dark blue leather was worn to white, the plastic ID casing cracked, the velcro tangled with cotton. The poor thing looked tired from a half-decade of expansion and contraction. When I put the old wallet away, I tried to remember where it came from. When did I start using this thing? Obviously college, as the university is stamped on the front. Why? I probably used it because the gates of our college had prox-card readers, so I treated my ID as just another key. I used to have a real wallet, a back pocket wallet, as evidenced by the rectangular denim scar on the back of my oldest pair of jeans. But that real wallet is sitting in my desk, filled with unused frequent flier cards and movie stubs.

I remember what I used before the old leather ID holding-wallet: a clear plastic ID-holder clipped to my belt, on a retractable cord that made a zipping noise every time I used it to open the black gates of Calhoun. Yes, Chaz destroyed that one Friday in the dining hall, fiddling with it while I ate my clam strips and fries. Telling him to stop just made him grin maniacally and pull on it like a stubborn lawnmower. The cord snapped, and my eyes rolled. This retractable, zippy holder evolved into the one I carry now; the lineage of the back pocket wallet stopped in graduate school, when I began biking to work every day.

The ancestor of that zippy wallet, which was a gift from my father, was a zippy ID clip that came with the prox card for a lab job I had during the summer before college. I would swipe in and out and leave it in my car at lunch, and on the hot days the plastic would feel sticky to the touch. Before that, I used another zippy-clip to hold a prox card to Sandia, while also using a black leather wallet thick enough with paper and plastic to leave a permanent indentation in my right butt cheek. My keys, I remember, always went in my left pocket (why left?). The keys were more manageable then. I held only housekeys, later car keys. My first cell phone, a monstrosity, was clipped to the right side of my belt. Later generations of cell phones, artificially selected for sleekness, migrated to my right pocket.

Before all this, there was a singular black leather wallet in high school that, like some parable, developed an increasingly large hole as I filled it. It perilously held cash, then a provisional driver’s license, then a real driver’s license, then a credit card, then credit cards, frequent shopper cards, fake bank cards, anything–I excitedly stuffed any piece of plastic of that size into this wallet. Growing up meant having a filled wallet to thumb through while looking stunned at a Trader Joe’s. What? ID? Oh, for the bottle of wine. Give me a few minutes to dig through this accordion of maturity.

Before all that, I had a brown wallet the size of a hardcover novel with my first checkbook, which I learned to balance in middle school math class, where Ms. Alegra had us rent fictional cars and put fictional down-payments on houses snipped from newspaper listings. I never balanced a checkbook again. Before that, I had a blue nylon wallet with velcro fixtures that I used to carry in my right front pocket, but it held very little back then: my daily lunch money and maybe a few Magic: The Gathering cards. The nylon stiffened and cracked because I filled it with nickels; I always had five cents change leftover from lunch, and this meant that every four days I could use my hoarded nickels to buy a twenty-cent Little Debbie treat from the lady behind the glass counter. Star Crunch or Nutty Bar?

And before that, well, before that I was just a child and had nothing of value to carry.