I had lunch recently with a few friends, and at a certain point the conversation took an awkward turn. We were having a completely normal discussion — it was even a little boring, if you ask me — about families and children and the complications that arise when divorced people with children marry other divorced people with children, when suddenly the energy at the table shifted. There was a noticeable chill in the air.
At least, I thought so. But I’ve learned the hard way never to acknowledge socially awkward moments when they’re happening. The wisest strategy is to wait and gossip about it later.
“Did you notice how weird it got when we were talking about stepkids?” I asked one of my lunch companions later. “What was that all about?”
He looked at me with surprise. “Wait, you don’t know?” he asked.
When I shook my head, he started to tell me some rather private (and embarrassing) information about one of the guys at lunch. “The thing is,” he began, “when he and his wife split, and before he met his second wife—” And then he suddenly stopped talking, removed his phone from his pocket, checked it carefully, and then put it back in his pocket. He started talking again.
“The thing is,” he said, “when he and his wife split, and before he met his second wife—”
He stopped himself again. He took his phone out of his pocket again, checked it carefully again, and was about to put it back in his pocket again but didn’t. Instead, he turned the phone off, waited for the screen to go completely dark, and then started talking again.
But by that time, I didn’t really care what the dark secret was. I was more interested in why he went to such elaborate lengths with his phone. Even as he was telling me the mildly juicy story about our mutual friend, my mind was distracted by trying to figure out why he was so careful about shutting off his phone before diving into the good stuff.
There had to be a story there, right? Had he suffered some kind of mortifying experience involving trash-talking a friend and an unfortunate pocket dial? Did he know something about our surveillance society that I should know, too? As my mind clicked through the possibilities, my friend wound up his explanation for the weirdness at lunch. I regret to say that I didn’t hear any of it. I only refocused my attention back to the moment when I saw him reactivating his phone.
“Why did you turn off your phone?” I asked.
“Because I’m convinced that it’s never really off, and somehow it’s going to call the person I’m talking about while I’m talking about him,” he said in a what-are-you-an-idiot? tone of voice.
“That sounds awfully paranoid.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And you want to know why? Because I am paranoid.”
I asked him if he felt like he was being spied on, or if technology was just dangerously unreliable, or if some combination of carelessness, bad luck, or sinister forces was at work here.
“Yes,” he said. “All of those. Look, I reboot my computer after every Zoom call. I turn off my phone if I’m going to gossip. I look around the entire restaurant whenever I start to tell an even mildly good joke. And even then I know I’m going to mess up sometime. I know that somehow, some way, my phone will automatically dial the exact person I’m gossiping about and deposit the entire monologue about his career implosion or bald spot or unfaithful spouse onto his voicemail. And I know that no matter how quietly I say it, or how carefully I couch it, if I imitate my Taiwanese next-door neighbor, someone’s going to hear it and I am going to be in giant trouble. So, yeah, I’m paranoid. About everything.”
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I tried to laugh it off, but I was suddenly aware of the number of microphones and cameras in my life, and the limitless devices that can record and broadcast anything, at any time. It doesn’t require some evil political plot or shadow multinational corporation to be scary. It’s scary enough to think that I could — and probably will, with my luck — send a crass text about a certain friend’s explosive weight gain to the group text that includes that friend.
We all have raving paranoids in our lives. And usually, they’re harmless cranks. Sure, some of them graduate to the tin foil headwrap stage, but mostly they mutter about the “Tri-Lateral Commission” or the “media entertainment complex” and go about their business. But my friend is the worst kind of paranoid. He’s the kind that makes sense.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
