Remember when the most exciting part of a holiday was landing back at Gatwick and turning your Nokia 3310 on to receive a barrage of texts from your mates that you’d missed all week while you grumpily traipsed around Greek ruins behind your parents? No longer. Now, despite data roaming charges that cost more than a month’s rent, and a very vocal wish to live in a world where you don’t have to feel so, like, constantly connected, you still manage to spend most of your holidays looking at your phone. In fact, according to a new study, a third of Britons said that they would prefer a good internet connection to a clean room or a brilliant hotel restaurant. Because, really, who cares about a cockroach-less room as long as you can find out what James Franco’s latest dick move is?
Here’s how your phone ruins your holiday.
** ‘Do you guys have wi-fi or…’**
Said in the style of the Superbad MySpace quote, this quickly becomes the go-to soundbite of the holiday after being uttered at ever café, restaurant, bar or shop. What’s totally great is when they do have it and you spend the next two hours looking down at your phone jealously checking out pictures of your friend’s birthday at Walkabout before leaving and muttering something along the lines of, ‘I think I had the salad?’
No planning of any kind
Ha! Remember when you were a total chump and spent a fortune on those Lonely Planet books on your gap year? How fucking heavy was that Thailand one as well? Then it was all, like, ‘Ooh, let’s sit in a cafe and circle places we want to see in this town.’ Waste of time. Nowadays, everything you need to know about a place, including where your hotel is, can be found on your phone. Which is great. Until you realise you have no way of accessing Lonelyplanet.com and are forced to resort to wandering the streets aimlessly until you find a sunburnt Brit you can quiz on where the nearest tourist attraction is. It almost definitely wasn’t meant to be like this.
The big data roaming lie
‘Two minutes on Facebook won’t cost all that much will it? I’ll just do it really slyly, a quick log on and log off. Orange probably won’t even notice, I’ll be so quick. I’ll be the Usain Bolt of internet usage. Yeah.’ Shame you did it twice a day every day for the entire holiday and now your bill’s come through you can’t afford to buy food.
Insta-panic
Is there anything worse than being in a beautiful place and being robbed of your ability to share it with people? Now you finally understand the true meaning of that Alanis Morissette song. How are the people back home going to know what an awesome time you're having? They’re probably sitting there right now thinking, ‘Jeez, *she’s *clearly having a boring holiday, I definitely won’t hang out with her when she comes back.’ There’s always the option of uploading the pics when you get to wi-fi hotspot, but you’ve taken so many pictures of awesome and hilarious things that you’ll be uploading seven at a time, and that, of course, just looks desperate. No one wants to be that guy. Total. Fucking. Minefield.
FOMO
You’ve swum with dolphins, absailed down a massive cliff, been blessed by a local Shaman, but for some reason you can’t quite find that inner peace. Sure you got two separate people commenting ‘so jelz!’ under your last picture of the sunset over the Indian Ocean, but that picture of the BBQ your mates are having in their back garden? If you’re perfectly honest, it bothers you a little. What exactly were they talking about? Were they planning a holiday together that you’re going to miss out on? Were they talking about you? Or worse, were they* not* talking about you? Holy crap they've forgotten you already. You’re nothing to them now, and you haven’t got a friend in the world left all thank to this stupid once-in-a-lifetime holiday you just *had *to take. FFS.
Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons
Picture: Rory DCS
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.