A new phone

can be a joy to some - and a despair to others.
The Senior Cat has a new phone. He hopes it will be simpler to operate than the last "mobile" phone.
My siblings expect him to have it on him at all times. They expect him to be instantly available.
He refuses to cooperate. His views about phones are "old-fashioned". They are there for when they are actually needed. You only phone someone if there is a genuine reason to do so. The "just checking" idea does not impress him.
It is different of course he phones one of his friends. As he points out he only does that "once in a while". It isn't every day. Middle Cat is inclined to check every day. She doesn't trust me to look after him and let her know if something needs attention - unless of course, as recently, she can't get in her vehicle and rush over here. 
    "Dad should have it on him at all times," Brother Cat informed me again the other day.
    "I can't do anything about that," I told him, "It's up to him."
    "You should make him have it with him," Black Cat informed me when I answered his phone yesterday. I told her he wouldn't answer it in church and the person he had gone with is much more adept at using his phone than the Senior Cat will ever be. What is more he would be surrounded by people with phones. He won't take it into church because, on the one occasion he did take the old one, it rang in the middle of the sermon. He still curls up in embarrassment at the memory. (It was a wrong number.) He didn't know how to put it on the vibration mode. 
I know a lot of older people like him. They see no need to be constantly "available". They don't want to be "checked up on" constantly. 
I sympathise.
It is different for the young. They feel naked and vulnerable without their "smart phones". There seems to be an urgent need to be always available. They might miss out on that vital piece of information, that invitation, that piece of gossip.
But there are the young who manage without them. At Ms W's school the boarders are not permitted to have phones with them at all times. There are set times for them to phone their parents and their parents and designated people to phone them. At other times you speak to someone in the office. It is only for the most  urgent of reasons that a student and parent can communicate at other times.
Day girls have to hand their phones in. Anyone caught with a phone has the phone confiscated and loses the right to bring a phone to school at all. Parents are told. The rule is rarely broken. The girls largely approve of it. They might grumble but Ms W's friend told me yesterday, "It's better than the school she (a neighbour) goes to. She reckons they just sit there with their phones at lunch time and don't event talk to each other." 
That is likely an exaggeration but I have been past the local high school and seen the girls sitting on the low wall and staring at their phones. It isn't friendly.
The idea of banning phones in school time has been raised again in this morning's paper. Ms W and her friends could tell you that it would be a good idea. Leave your phone, if you have one, at a designated point when you arrive and pick it up when you leave. Yes, another thing the administration has to worry about, something that had not even been thought of even when I was at university. 
But we managed without them. We didn't think we needed them for "safety". 
I don't know whether the world was really any safer then but perhaps it was. After all, we actually talked to other people instead of sending text messages.