The Key to a Clean Break? It's DELETE

Dial 'O' for Over
The Key to a Clean Break? It's DELETE.

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01



It all started with the cell phone. They met at a party. He was from Nicaragua. She was half Peruvian. She gave him her cell phone number. He gave her his. They fell in love. Soon, they were engaged. No wedding date. Just a promise.

Then things started to crumble. He went back to Nicaragua for a visit. Two long months, he waited. But she never called his cell phone.

So when he returned to Wheaton, he did what he felt was necessary.

He DELETED her.

No conversation. No Dear Susan letter. No explanation. No angry confrontation that ended in a fit of tears with doors slammed.

Just the push of a couple of buttons.

And just like that, it was over.

She didn't even know that she had been deleted.

"I call it being terminated," the deleter, Mel Gutierriez, 28, says. "When you are upset, you just have to delete them."

Her number was gone and so was she. Because in today's society, cell phone numbers are crucial. They are like people. They live and they die. They breathe in those little cases people carry around with them -- in pockets, in purses, in compartments in the car, attached to belts and pants. Waiting on nightstands.

Holding little secrets like little black books.

Holding desires.

Holding power. With a button, a number -- and a person's very existence -- can be DELETED or IGNORED.

Not long ago, when phones were attached to the wall, there was a mystery to their rings. People could not be blocked, nor could they be deleted. Back then, phones were simple. No games. You dialed the number. If somebody was there, they answered. If they were not, the phone rang until you decided to hang up.

There was no call screening, no Caller ID. People were not banished with a DELETE button.

Now society brings with it the constant ringing of phones, the beeping of computers, the robotic voices saying who is behind the ring. Communication has become sanitized and with it, personal relationships have become clinical. You are in or you are out, based upon whether they like you. Question: Why won't they take the call? Answer: Because you have been blocked or deleted.

"Every group and every tribe has some method of shunning and throwing people out," says James Katz, director of the center for mobile communication studies at Rutgers University and author of the book "Magic in the Air," about how people use mobile phones in their lives, which is set to be released in May.

"In our high-tech era, deleting somebody from your cell phone book is the equivalent of throwing them out and shunning them." When you have been DELETED, you are banished into the netherworld of wherever cell phone numbers go, a realm between this world and the next.

Cell phone numbers have become the people they represent. "Indeed, when people lose their cell phones, it's like losing their minds," Katz says. "And they forget who their friends are because they have lost their cell phones."

In Katz's research, he found that cell phones ringing in the middle of the night from secret callers often are the precursors to breakups. "Many young people have told me how a boyfriend or girlfriend will grab the phone when they are not around and go through the 'Recent Call' list. Or in some cases, pry it from hands and demand they explain who that was."

In the past, he said, those clues were more -- shall we say -- physical. "There used to be jokes about lipstick on the collar or some strange blonde's hair on the man's jacket. Those would be low-tech and low-frequency-success techniques to check up on other people, but now in our digital-mobile age, there are very big digital fingerprints all over technology to trace what you have been doing."

Ernesto Alegria, a 30-year-old taekwondo instructor, says cell phones have been disastrous to his "playa" action. "Say you have a girlfriend. You know she is going to go through the phone and check the numbers," he says, leaning on the counter of a cell phone kiosk in Wheaton Mall. "In my case, I don't use my phone, I use somebody else's cell phone to call another girl. Pay phones work better."

With Stacy Fink, 21, it wasn't a number that got her in trouble. You see, she didn't think her boyfriend had it in him to snoop, to go through her cell phone, her personal information.

One night she was sleeping. He saw the text message.

Her face turns red. She won't repeat what it said. But that night she was out on the street. "My boyfriend kicked me out in the middle of the night. I didn't think he was going to go through my phone. I forgot to delete it," she says wistfully. Now, she has no worries about deleting numbers or messages: "I don't have a boyfriend."

Instead, she watches her girlfriends spy for unknown numbers in the digital black books of their boyfriends. They "check numbers and they call the numbers," she says. "If it's a guy who answers, they hang up. If it's a girl, they ask what's going on. They get caught because they forgot to delete the numbers."

The DELETE button has the power to alter existence. Now you are there. Push an unforgiving button. Now you are gone, absolutely. (Imagine if the noble Lady Macbeth had within her grasp the noble cell phone. She may not have had so much trouble with the damned spot.)

Bridgett, 22, who doesn't want her last name used because she wants her cell phone business private, is trying to explain. There she sits, hanging out in the mall. Pink shirt, pink lipstick. Gold shoes. Swinging her legs, which are dangling from the counter of a cell phone kiosk. And, yeah, she admits, she has DELETED people. What's the problem with that?

"When you talk to someone like a friend and they do something, you be like, bam ," she says, pushing an imaginary button on an imaginary cell phone. "Like just delete the number from the phone. When you are mad at somebody, take the aggression out and delete all their numbers and all their photos. You be like, 'I'm done.' Then later, you get a call. And you are like, 'Who are you?' "

Apologizing. Making up a story, blaming the lack of communication, the lapse, on technical difficulties. "You know what? My phone got messed up, but I'll put your number back in," she says to the DELETED person, promising to give him existence again in her phone.

But psych !

"I just pretend to put the number back." Because she and her cell phone have moved on.