Brick Phone Club

If you ever suspect that your smartphone has a hold on you, Brick Phone Club is for you.

Conceived by local artist and environmental champion, Lora Flora, Brick Phone Club is a place for people to gather to discuss the effects of mobile phone and other device addictions on their lives. Participants explore ways they’d like to reclaim their time and attention. It’s a friendly chat held amongst kind, good humoured people, generally at spots such as The Local Hotel in South Fremantle on Thursday evenings at 7pm.

Switching constantly between our lives to our phones, between multiple tabs, multiple apps, answering that message right now, and attempting to “multitask” has the regrettable impact of effectively purging whatever we may have just learned (i.e. the “opening the fridge door moment”). An interview by Huberman Lab revealed that checking your phone first thing in the morning after you wake up harms your emotional regulation and the process of coding experiences to memory, which is critical for personal growth. It destroys concentration and harms your ability to learn. It makes it impossible to enter “flow state”, where you are at your calmest and most creative because you are beautifully immersed in your endeavour and finally concentrating on it.

Johann Hari tells us in his groundbreaking book, Stolen Focus, that a constantly distracted person is undeniably dumber than their concentrated counterpart. They will report ten IQ points lower than a focussed person. Conversely, the same person enjoying a joint will only lose 5 IQ points. And in the US, it was exceptionally rare for office workers to enjoy even 20 minutes of uninterrupted time a day. We should revisit our strategies for relaxation.

At Brick Phone Club, Lora Flora pledges to switch to a “dumb phone” for three months alongside a few other measures and asks if I’ll do the same.

“Absolutely not. I need it. But I’ll try and work in some good habits?”

Then true to form, I found a great tv series on a streaming platform and commenced binging it. Mobile phone usage decreased slightly. Managed to convince myself to only check personal emails 4 times a day and ideally have no phones in the living room after dinner. Instead, I filled the void with compulsive tv viewing. I’m not proud. But I am intrigued by the plotline. If I just watch one more, perhaps we’ll uncover more of the mystery!

My tv habits are tempered by my evening obligations. Off I pop to central Perth on Wednesday night to the Urban Design Forum WA event where the reshaping the anthropocene and Perth’s urban design “at the crossroads” are discussed. A very interesting evening, even if we did hear old messages slightly polished to sound new yet again. Stand out talk for me was the presentation on Land Reclamation in the Maldives by Eden Rigo and the pervasive influence of public discourse, i.e. political pressure, on illogical policy. The perpetual widening of the Mitchell Freeway as a so-called solution to traffic congestion comes to mind. But I enjoyed it. Worth feeling shattered the next day. No matter, I’ll catch a rideshare to work and avoid the hassle of having to run for two buses with three bags.

I arrive at work the next day, bleary-eyed but quietly satisfied I managed to meal prep for the day and looking forward to telling the planners what the urban designers think of our output.

Pat pockets. Strangely empty pockets. A little draining of blood to the face. Check bag. Check other bag. Check if it fell amongst the food. It did not. And it is on silent during working hours because I like to be courteous to my fellow office workers. Or did.

I’ve left it in the car, haven’t I.

Alright, let’s try logging into the Uber app. Ah, it requires mobile phone verification. Not great. Email verification? I can’t remember my password. Changing it requires mobile phone verification. Blast it.

Off to the Uber website I go, click on the Help Centre button, and advise that I cannot log into my Uber account, here’s my mobile number and email, here is the alternative number and email I can be reached on.

A perfunctory acknowledgement email. Another email advising this stream of communication will be closed and another shall be opened. Odd. Only have the one email.

“I’m sorry to hear about your lost item. Keep an eye on your phone in case the driver tries to reach you”.

Thanks for nothing, AI chatbot. A smidgeon of decent customer service would have resolved this by now. Like the time I lost my camera in a DiDi! That was a piece of cake! Resolved in an hour.

Wait patiently for a few hours while becoming visibly more dishevelled and striving not to snarl answers to innocently irritating customer questions. At least there’s coffee and chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. I can have a modest little dopamine hit while I regret hours of past decisions.

I learn that Uber has in fact been sending updates to my personal email address. I advise politely that I have no access to that account. And silence.

In the evening, I fire up my personal laptop and thankfully, the email account is still logged in. The phone has been found! Here are instructions on what to do next:

“Click on the menu bar in the top right hand corner, select your trip, select lost item, and contact driver”.

Ok, that doesn’t work the same on a desktop browser and I don’t have the app because I don’t have the phone but fine. I go to recent activity, select the trip, select “contact driver”.

“We see you’ve raised a similar request for this and our support team are currently looking into it. View support messages”.

Oh for God’s sake!

The upside is that amongst the generated response content, Uber advises that the driver has located my lost phone and they will advise me once he’s ready to contact me.

But after reaching day 3 of no phone and no update despite multiple requests on my behalf to obtain one, I go to their Instagram page and appeal for help. They are distinctly non-committal and unhelpful, advising they sent a follow up message to the driver but can’t guarantee a timeframe when the phone shall be returned by. I advise I want to escalate this as a complaint against the customer service team. Finally, THAT moves it along a millimetre.

Apparently they have given my partner’s number to the driver with my permission, and he will reach out that way.

We hear a great big nothing.

After accepting I require a temporary workaround if I am to safely leave the house and remain contactable, I fished the older mobile phone out the drawer which by sheer providence I hadn’t gotten around to disposing of at an electronics drop off. No SIM card but it connects seamlessly to wifi without demanding a password, you beauty you.

I await the 502 bus to take me to Fremantle station, hoping perhaps this once it’ll run on time as there’s no way to be sure without the Transperth app and even then… Along comes Terence in the car five minutes later, he’s checked the app and the bus is running half an hour late. Typical. He kindly takes me to the train station and I borrow his smartrider. Zero balance. Oh thank you, Terence.

On the train, I thankfully quasi-noise-cancelling jam earbuds in to avoid being subjected to sitting amongst other people including a wriggly child with nothing but a book and my thoughts, and count my lucky stars the old phone had already downloaded my Spotify music playlist and that Blutooth exists.

I head out to central Perth on a Saturday night because I am not letting these shenanigans get in the way of my plans to see Tim Ross’ The Australian Dream with Dad (excellent show, by the way) and learn there are very few options for the hapless phoneless. A $2 Optus SIM card is acquired. It requires a wifi connection to start the activation process. Of course it does. Thank you City of Perth for providing public wifi! If only we had that on our public transport!

I get to the activation page. It requires email verification. Fine. Receive email, punch in code. Requires Medicare card. Fine. In it goes. Personal details entered. You’re all set! Just confirm payment and you’re away. And I was! Or would be! If verifying the payment didn’t require a blasted SMS code verification sent to my missing mobile phone! Dad witnessed a rage not experienced since I was a sulky prepubescent child and sipped contemplatively on his wine as I tried to break the loop while we sat at Pica Bar in the drizzling rain.

Not to mention trying to check the bank balance, which after a solid year of requiring a humble pin now demands of me my secure password. It’s a very secure password. I haven’t got the faintest idea of what it is. Good luck trying to change it, we’ll send you an SMS code to your listed mobile phone number to make sure it’s you. Pity we can’t walk into a bank branch anymore to talk to a human being and resolve it that way.

So, here we are, stuck in the perfect loop of verification. Everything requires SMS verification. Wouldn’t it be a shame if you couldn’t possibly access the very phone that now has 200+ messages unread on it?

“I am learning things about myself”, I confessed while Lora cackled on the other side of the phone and expressed her sympathies as I told her the news on Sunday morning.

I keep my eyes constantly peeled while out and about for Mr R in his white Nissan X-Trail in the faint hope I could perhaps sprint after him and put an end to this misery.

It has been four days now. I now contemplate the grim reality of having to march myself to the police station with the announcement “Uber stole my phone”.