Hello! I don’t have a SIM card. Does that offend you? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people have tried to convince me to get a SIM card, and none have succeeded. Go ahead and try, if you’d like. You could call me the Sleeping Beauty of the tech-saturated 21st century, except I don’t get enough sleep to qualify for that.
How, you might wonder, can anyone function without a data plan? Without a phone number? Without the ability to instantly summon information at the click of a button? One theory put forth by a co-editor is that I am “a time traveller from the 17th century.” Sorry to disappoint, but this is not the case.
It is a source of fascination to a great many people that I have survived thus far without a SIM card. I find it fascinating how billions of people can take for granted such a thing which is withheld from many billions more in developing countries, or from the global population of millennia past. That this device which has ensconced itself so rapidly in our society has gripped our collective minds to the extent that we forget how to cope without it; what does that say for our independence? Yes, there are plenty of modern marvels that we likewise depend on, but few whose advantages are so thoroughly and surreptitiously compensated by other coexisting technologies.
One crucial technological development in recent years is the introduction of offline maps, downloadable on the Apple Maps app. This is only necessary when travelling, and can be downloaded ahead of time at no cost whatsoever, to the consequence that if I ever get lost, I may only blame my own poor map literacy.
However, in Australia there is another particularly useful tool which is thoroughly underappreciated by the rest of the population: the Telstra phone box. Who has used one of them recently, or taken a moment to be grateful for their service? They provide free calls nationwide and bubbles of internet which sprout all over the city, without a word of appreciation! It does, at least, make up for the appalling cell service that the rest of you have to endure. Hang in there.
The thing about needing information to be immediately available is that it rules out the potential to be frustrated, to be left in the dark, to have something withheld from you. Instant gratification does not equate to pleasure, and the satisfaction of discovering something after searching for a long time is immensely greater than receiving the answer seconds after the question is asked. Like the time I forgot what the capital of Madagascar was, and I refused to Google it and wracked my brain for an hour until I smacked a table and shouted “Antananarivo!”
Tangentially, I didn’t have a phone until a little over a year ago. And then it was only because my trusty iPod had a scant 32GB of storage. All the same, I was loath to replace it. It was so much more compact and lightweight than my current phone, which was the smallest and most similar model I could find. And it did everything that an iPhone did, but less obnoxiously.
The financial benefits would be more evident to you than to me; I can’t remember the last time I paid for a data plan. How much is it again? And you have to do that every month? Gosh. Although I get to spend the money I’d save on data plans on chai lattes to get me through the weekly Honi layup, so it probably balances out in the end. Ah, I’m pulling your leg, you’ve definitely drawn the short straw here.
Despite lacking a data plan, I do possess a landline. It seems to have escaped everyone’s notice that mobile phones aren’t really designed for calling; they’re designed for tapping on. Nobody who holds a glass screen to their ears can remark that the shape seems designed to fit to their face. But a landline, that trusty old gizmo, has a spot not only to listen from, nor even to speak into, but a solid handle! The Samsung Galaxy S24 could never hope to emulate that.
What else can a phone plan do that I can’t? Very little, when you think about it. In fact, I’m currently blanking. Wait! It allows people to wake me up at three in the morning to tell me that there’s a new celebrity scandal going down on TikTok (I jest; I don’t have TikTok either).
Disclaimer: The author of this piece acquired a SIM card around 48 hours after writing this. But it was for Mardi Gras, so it doesn’t really count.
