My Mobile Phone Disorder

"Is my girlfriend cheating on me", asks a sniveling young man who feels that the world is about to end should the answer be yes!

No, son, she is not cheating on you. What we have here is far worse than that. She is suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. She is addicted to sending SMS messages and just cannot stop. She is so addicted that her mobile phone is her first priority; her second mobile phone is her second priority and so on down the line until we come to you. You come at the end of the list after ten other mobiles, her friends mobile, a land line, the coin box at the end of the street and a local copy of the yellow pages.

For those who would like to know if their children suffer from this malady a few pointers are: the fallen can send over 200 messages in a day, they do not sleep well, they run up huge telephone bills, they are always irritable and they often resort to serious lying. In extreme cases the victims will be very isolated people, spending hours alone in dark rooms with a series of phones that they own (or not) and all switched on and in use. They will have resorted to petty thieving and will eventually turn to large scale robbing to finance their habit and they will develop a serious anxiety should the signal to their phones be lost.

For prospective holiday makers with obsessive compulsive disorders, the ideal holiday paradise might just be Sri Lanka and it won't be for some fine Ceylon Tea, palm lined beaches nor to flirt with a Tamil Tiger. It will be to take advantage of the mobile phone phenomena where even the local tramps are text fiends. As a brief overview Sri Lanka was the first country in SE Asia to introduce mobile phones in 1989. They also became the first country in Asia to introduce the new 3G system for high speed data transmission and video streaming. The government has slashed the VAT on mobile phones so it is one of the cheapest places in the world to buy one. Cheaper if one should hop along to the "Five Start Center" in Colombo, an area that certainly does not live up to its name. In this dark and gloomy alley one can purchase a smuggled mobile phone from a hopeful street hawker (many phones are brand new yet half the price). Oh, and should anybody get themselves arrested for trying to smuggle a few hundred phones out of the country life in a Sri-Lankan jail will not be so bad - the jails are awash with mobile phones.

For the average person who tends to use a mobile phone for emergency purposes, and who would rather talk in a bar than text the unknown, bad news has arrived. The spam crisis that has made life with email unbearable has come to the mobile phone. Email spam overloads mail boxes, brings virus's that shuts down systems and loses data worldwide. Email spam causing endless people to spend hours panning for maybe one email that has meaning. Spam that has caused many gullible people to part with millions for no return except - more spam!

Spam has arrived on the mobile phone. Cell phones are rapidly becoming the new target of junk mail sent by eager marketers and individuals who see gullible people at the other end of the line. Currently DoCoMo (Japans biggest mobile phone operator) subscribers are the hardest hit where messages urging them to give blood, to purchase a new mobile phone or to forward a chain mail (or face serious financial consequences) abound. In fact mobile phone users are now being beeped in cafes, on buses, at work and at home with the family to give Mr. Namable Chowan in Mobutu details of their bank account so that they can look after 10,000,000 US dollars. Lovers in restaurants are drawn away from romance as beeps indicate the offer of genital enlargements or Viagra to enhance performance.

In fact the problem is growing so rapidly that companies are forced to take legal action against spammers, to shut down accounts belonging to spammers and for people to block incoming calls/messages that do not originate from known sources. The Microsoft Corp is doing its little bit to fight spam. Mr. Jeff Bullwinkle, who is a spokesman for the company that is supposedly spearheading a worldwide anti-spam campaign, stated the obvious: "It's big in markets where mobile communications are prevalent". And with that said one can not expect that Microsoft will be at the forefront of reducing the amount of junk mail sent.

And the worst thing about mobile phone spam is that the cost of opening the message is often charged to the receiver's phone when they open it.

In answer to the question from the 'love lost' young man: "no. your girlfriend is not cheating on you, she is suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. In fact the only way to be able to talk to her is to get on your own mobile phone and to send her a few messages".

But all may not be lost. Therapists the world over are seeing dollars and mobile phone addicts can now enter therapy or attend live-in clinics where they will slowly be weaned off the mobile phone. Their allotted time spent of the phone will be gradually reduced until hopefully after three months they will no longer feel the irresistible urge to flick their thumb over a small pad. These same 'experts' also stress that addictions can sometimes be pre-empted if teachers or parents spot them early - regardless of the fact that the parent bought the phone in the first place and that mobile phones should not be allowed in classrooms.