Cell Phones: Parasites or Appendages?

I think my cell phone may have become an appendage. For work purposes I am required to keep my cell phone on my person at all times and even shut off the shower to take a phone call if necessary. Days “off,” weekends, holidays, 2 a.m.; it doesn’t matter, I have to answer the cell phone when a call comes through. Now constantly carrying a cell phone isn’t a rarity nowadays, so you might be asking yourself, “how could it be like an appendage?” For those skeptics, I ask you to consider the following points:

1. Day-to-day I take it for granted that my cell phone will be on my person. Carrying it with me is nearly as unconscious as remembering to bring my left leg with me each morning.

2. If I do happen to misplace my cell phone I run around frantically searching for it as I would a severed finger so that it may be surgically reattached at the soonest possible moment.

3. When I am forced to leave my phone behind for whatever reason (e.g. when I am in a classified environment where no cell phones are allowed and I have forwarded my calls to a landline), I often have phantom cell phone vibrations and pat around my clothing for a bit looking for my cell phone before remembering it is no longer attached. This is akin to the stories people tell of having lost a leg in a freak ping-pong tournament accident and later having phantom itches in said missing appendage.

It is clear to me that my cell phone has in fact become an appendage of sorts. I guess this is my first step toward becoming a cyborg. Next I need a set of those glasses that have the miniature screens inside them and connect to the internet. Then I’ll build myself a spaceship shaped like a cube and run around “collecting” others to assimilate… oh wait, I think that’s been done already (was that Star Trek or Microsoft, or both?).