Would you rather lose your cell phone or your wallet? Recently, CNN took an informal poll on the street and most people they interviewed said they would rather lose their wallet. One young woman said, “I can use my cell phone to cancel my credit cards. I would be lost without my cell phone.”
There is still a reason to hang on to your wallet. An ID card or driver’s license is still necessary for many transactions, travel, medical services, and jobs. Many college students can’t function on their campus without their student ID. It gets them into the dorm and contains their dining dollars, so losing their wallet would be a big deal. But maybe we don’t realize how attached we are to our wireless devices UNTIL we lose them. Most students and adults in their 20’s don’t have a land line phone in their dorm rooms or apartments. So if they lost their cell phone, most wouldn’t know the important phone numbers to call. We are all so used to just pushing the button on our contact list.
In a recent Reuters survey, two thirds of the people said they sleep with their cell phones next to them and don’t turn them off. It makes them feel constantly connected. They’re afraid they will miss something. And the most popular features used by those surveyed, other than the obvious phone calls and SMS, are the alarm clock, camera, and games.
Has all of our valuable information moved from our wallet or billfold to our cell phone? We are moving more and more to on line banking, ordering products & merchandise on line, and increasingly using our cell phones for these services. To lose your cell phone now could be disastrous with the potential for fraud and theft. Be thankful for the security code we can now use on our handheld devices, which we don’t have for our wallets.
To lose either your cell phone or the wallet would ruin your day. What has become very apparent, is that our wireless device has now certainly become as important as our wallet, and for some people, even more so!