Look over there yonder — it’s Yondr, coming to lock up our phones once more.
As someone straddling the line between the millennial and Gen Z generations (depending on who you believe), I’ve only had my electronic device aboveboard confiscated twice.
In both instances — November 2022 and this past Wednesday, October 15 — Yondr, the phone-poaching pouch-pen founded in 2014 to create phone-free environments in entertainment and education spaces, posted up at the UBS Elmont Arena gates to remind me that rockstar comedian John Mulaney has earned the right to temporarily take away mine.
According to the Trenton Public School District, which deploys these pouches, they are “secure, lockable cases that hold students’ personal cellphones during the school day. Upon arrival each morning: Students will place their cellphones into their individual Yondr pouch, which will then be locked and kept with them.”
According to New York Yankees announcer and ESPN New York sports talk radio stalwart Michael Kay, 63 — who was also at the three-for-all Mulaney, Jon Stewart, and Pete Davidson show on Wednesday — something alternative must be done to ensure guests can contact their children, or be easily contacted by them, in an emergency circumstance.
Sans kiddos at this juncture, my main squeeze and I enjoyed the hours of departure from the distraction that is the constant wave of messages flowing through our respective inboxes.
Such was made mightily evident when, mere seconds into the show, I realized I had failed to turn my sound off. Thankfully, guest services were right there to unzip, zip, and zip it good before I became chuckle fodder for one of the main events to siphon off-script comedy from at will.
Too many motivational Instagram memes sent from mother figures and literal moms. Too many wedding party group chats. Too much spam. Too much screen time — and not enough me time.
Perhaps one day we’ll live in a world where you can trade your smartphone at the could-become-a-Netflix-special door for a dumber one: a flip phone that can’t take pictures, flash a light and make a sound, nor utter a noise.
Either that, or we’ll all be able to know what it’s like to don an iWatch — or a comparable adjacent — if only for one night; one wherein we’ll be kept in the loop without missing a beat of being reminded that it’s better to drive into a house than into a tree, and that slovenly dryers from the ‘90s reign supreme.