A Smartphone Vacation that Wasn’t

I tried to go off the grid. I mostly failed.

The following is an excerpt from my recently published article in Law Technology News. Please click here to read the full article.

NOTE: Seems like a lot of folks identified with the visceral reaction I had to Sir Richard Branson’s unlimited vacation policy. This post is a continuation of the vacation theme. To the outsider, it appears I think of nothing but vacations, but I guarantee that’t not the case. ;-)

There’s nothing like a rustic getaway for modern information workers to fill our lungs with air again. The outdoors awakens the spirit and snaps us out of our zombie-like screen-inspired stupor. So with family in tow, I ditched the electronic confines of my life as a software executive and traded in my office tools for those of the outdoors: a Swiss army knife, a walking stick, a bottle of water, a fishing rod … and a flip phone.

My 2014 vacation was to be two glorious weeks with no Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, e-mail, or iPhone: a total detox from the information fire hose. I bought a $20 Verizon prepaid flip phone — like the ones Carrie Mathison breaks in half and tosses into garbage cans on “Homeland” — and gave the number to only my top management staff, my immediate family and my virtual assistant. We called it “the burner.”

There’s more and more evidence supporting the idea that all of the information we’re bombarded with is turning us into blithering idiots or, worse, compulsive texters steering our automobiles into oncoming traffic. Being plugged in 24/7 is not doing anyone any good.

We’re burnt out. We surf mindlessly and waste oodles of time reading listicles on Buzzfeed. We get hit with Tweets, emails, and messages on all number of platforms, deal with annoying people on Facebook, get sucked into horrifying Subreddits about My Little Pony, and can’t look up an entry on Wikipedia without clicking through 15 other articles.

With burner phone in hand, my intention was radical: I was going to turn off the iPhone for the duration of my trip. That notion didn’t last very long. Our airline canceled our flight and couldn’t fly us from Florida to the northeast for days. All other flight options included at least one or two connections and would have had us landing at 3 a.m.

Before you could say “Clark Griswold”, my wife and I made a quick decision to shift gears and drive the 23 hours from Florida to Massachusetts. It seems unthinkable to drive that far. But on the flip side, we’d get there before the airlines could have, we would save a little dough, and most importantly, we could bring things that are nearly impossible when you travel by air: our beloved Keurig machine, my son’s baseball bat, three dozen hangers, and some extremely sharp knives…

Please continue the story here.