There are a bunch of good reasons to have a phone on you. Would have saved me a lot of stress and a few whoopins back in the day.
My problem is kids having them in school. Parents are nearly as big of a problem. Parents think they need immediate contact with students, even during class. Our parents could call the school if there was an actual emergency. Now they fight the school if we restrict access to phones during class. To be fair, there are some benefits of students have phones on class, but they are not worth the distraction.
I was in elementary school when a teacher suddenly walked over to a classmate's gym bag and started pawing through it until he pulled out a transistor radio. Can you imagine that now?
A) Getting in trouble for having a radio, and
B) A teacher going through a student's personal items in the first place?
About 12 years ago I was working with a newly hired summer intern, after his sophomore year in college. He apparently had a bad wisdom tooth which needed to be pulled; and his mother called him several times over the course of the day. We were a mile from the truck at the time, and he was supposed to be working.
They are handy though. I got my first cell phone in 1996, after I almost had to walk out of the woods after working all day. It was hot , I was still beat from putting in a good day the previous day, and I'd lost a quart of Gatorade when I put it in a stream to keep cool... not realizing it would sink. I knocked off early and as I was walking back to my truck I discovered that somebody haad dumped a load of gravel across a culvert to spread at a later date and was coming back with 3 more... not realizing I was on the other side of the dead end road. Had I worked a full day the road would have been fully blocked.
We've all been issued Garmin InReach units.
inReach MINI Satellite Communicator
These tie into satellites so hopefully in an emergency we can send a message for help, even without cell coverage. Anybody who watches Matt's Offroad may have noticed that he had one of these mounted to his dash in a recent episode.
No matter what you carry for safety though, it's all useless if you don't use what's between your ears.
