Reach Out

AT&T used to have this ad "Reach out and touch someone". This was back in the 80s when they were much more dominant.

I was supposed to meet up with some folks last night, and that didn't work out. Why? Because I didn't have my phone. It was in my car. And I didn't know that until the next day.

Indeed, even when my phone is my apartment, I find it a pain. Usually, I'm sitting on the couch, and I have the phone elsewhere, which means I have to get up, and go get it.

In the old days, a home would have several phones because phones weren't portable. This would allow you to minimize the walking. You would think that portable phones, especially lightweight portable phones, would mean people would carry them everywhere.

Except when I'm at home, I find it a pain to have to carry a phone. I'd rather be in something more comfortable, say, a pair of shorts. If I'm sitting on the couch, I don't want to have to worry about crushing my phone. If I'm in the bedroom, I don't want to lug the phone from the living room to the bedroom.

I'm surprised there isn't a better way to handle this. Either, there should be a secure wireless way for my phone to go to other phones that stay in my home, or maybe, since I use my laptop a lot, it should go there.

Since my phone was in my car, and I didn't realize it was there, my friends were unable to contact me. That was partly a mental block. Sometimes you are trying to reach someone, and the only way you think of reaching of them is by phone.

But I'm the kind of person that prefers to be online a lot. So the other way to contact me is through IM, and less often, through email. That means a person ought to contact me in alternate ways.

Except that it doesn't occur to most people to try that. If the assumption is that you are always near your phone, but you're only at your computer every once in a while, then sending email seems like a very slow way, or using IM seems like a slow way. But for me, that's one of the possibilities.

And some people have the problem that their status is not accurate. Part of that is the problem of the IM client, which doesn't always detect that you're away. Part of that is because some people always say they're busy. They don't want other people to know what's up, or they know their friends would bug them if they weren't perpetually busy.

This busy/available status is called a person's (or their avatar's) presence.

This suggests that people want multiple ways to be reached. If I'm at home, there should be a way to send a message that is basically to the phone and to something in my home that doesn't move (like an electronic alert board) so if I'm at home, and I don't want my phone near me, people have a way to reach me.

Of course, some people don't want to be reached, but if you do, then you know.

I suppose I could coin a term and call it reachability, which is perfectly nerdy. But there should be tools to determine your own reachability, and to increase this through a one-stop method.