My phone went off at six this morning and for about twenty minutes I was glad it did. Checked the rain radar while sitting on the edge of the mattress, ordered a part for my lawnmower with thumbprint ID and saw there was a wreck on the bypass before I even pulled on my boots. Hard to argue with that. It saves you half an hour before you've even had coffee.

Then around five o'clock I was trying to fry some eggs. Phone's going off in my pocket because someone added me to another group thread on WhatsApp, the living room bulb wouldn't switch on because it lost the router password and my work email started dinging about something that nobody needed to look at until Monday anyway.

That's pretty much the deal with screens now. They fix the big, slow headaches and replace them with a dozen annoying little ones.

Back in late nineties, paying electric bill meant you had to drive over to an office on Main Street, stand behind people talking to the teller and get a receipt stamped with purple ink. If you got turned around in a neighborhood you hadn't visited, you pulled into a Sunoco, bought pack of gum and asked the guy behind the counter how to get past the railroad tracks.

It was slow. People complained about it constantly. But when you finished doing it, you were done. Nobody was sending you four push notifications an hour later to rate the counter clerk's attitude.

Now everything runs through different mediums. We don't need to wait in line at the utility company anymore but good luck remembering the twelve-character password with the special symbol you set up for the gas bill nine months ago. And if an app decides your session timed out or a server drops out somewhere, you're just stuck on your porch. You can't even pay cash at half the parking garages downtown now because they pulled the coin boxes out five years back to save on labor.

The worst part isn't even the tech breaking. It’s what happens to your head when you don't use it for simple stuff.

I couldn't tell you my sister's phone number if you put a gun to my head. I know the area code and that's about it. If my phone battery dumps while I'm two towns over, I wouldn't even know which highway exit to take to get back toward the river road because I've spent eight years just staring at the blue line on a screen telling me to bear left in four hundred feet.

None of this means anyone needs to throw their phone in the trash and go live in a tent. That’s silly. The internet does things in three seconds that used to eat up an entire Saturday morning.

You just have to stop letting it run every corner of your day.

Mute the junk you don't care about. If an app isn't a direct phone call from someone you actually know, turn the alerts off entirely. Stick a folded twenty-dollar bill behind your driver’s license so you can buy gas if the card terminal locks up. Write down five numbers on an index card and drop it in the console of your truck.

The gadgets work fine until they don't. The trick is making sure you can still buy dinner and find your house when the glass screen goes black.