Wireless Fetters in the Age of the Leash

From the ungrateful complaint department...

Fetter (FET-uhr), noun:
1. A chain or shackle for the feet, a chain by which an animal is confined by the foot, either made fast or disabled from free and rapid motion; a bond; a shackle.
2. Anything that confines or restrains; a restraint.
See some pictures and more information in the Wikipedia article.

Lately I've been going through my Irish music collection. A lot of it is folk music from the troubles they've had with the English over the years. I'm not going to comment on that one way or another except to say that some of these songs tell very poignant stories. Listen to "Fields of Athenry," for example, and you'll see what I mean. Some of the people that these songs talk about were transported and put in fetters for the duration of their several-month voyage.

I suppose I shouldn't complain too much about this livestock tag I've got on my leg. I can tell you some of the things that I think about it, though.

1. It's uncomfortable. They tried to put it on way too tight at first, but I made them loosen it up. I can still barely get a pinky underneath it.

2. It's rubbing off all the hair on that part of my leg and leaving marks in the skin similar to what I get from wearing socks for too long.

3. It's really bad when I'm on my feet for longer than a few minutes. My lower calves have a good amount of flex in them (that part of the body seems to be mostly muscle) and when I try to use these muscles, they swell up against the rubber strap. I asked the people who are monitoring this device what I should do about exercise and I got this obviously-couldn't-give-a-shit response: "lift weights." Apparently these people need to go back and get some more self-aggrandizing certifications in basic human physiology, because they seem to have no concept of aerobic fitness. In other words, lifting weights, doing pushups, etc. have little if any effect on one's heart and lung function (which is important to me). When I explained this fact to the guy on the other end of the phone, he suggested that I use part of my 2-hour-a-week free time to go jogging. This guy must have been a comedian before he became an idiot, because trying to run with this thing on would probably result in a preventive amputation. I guess I'm going to be doing a whole lot more fitness work when I get this thing off.

4. In some ways this is worse than actually wearing leg irons. Yes, I've had those put on me before. It was an attempt to humiliate the small-time criminals (DUI, not paying child support, missing court dates, etc.) who showed up at the same jail in ___________ I did, reporting to serve our sentences, which ranged from 24 hours to 24 months. A couple of guys (and girls) who only had to do one day ended up being bounced back and forth for 3 days, wearing leg chains and handcuffed into groups of 10 or so the whole time. I can understand the necessity of applying those restraints to someone who's been accused of committing a violent crime or has a propensity to attack judges or something, but this was a group of chumps (myself included, of course) who did something dumb and then showed up to jail voluntarily. My associate who works in the __________ state prison system tells me that it's all a mind game. Fortunately, I like mind games, and I can put up with that kind of nonsense. It just requires one to ignore the other 40 sweaty men locked in the same 8 x 12 foot cell as you for a few hours (NB: if you hear someone tell you that you're about to get put into the holding tank, it won't be nice). Being able to wander around the house at will while wearing this thing is a mind game too, because if I go somewhere I'm not supposed to, I'll be standing tall before the Man explaining why He shouldn't put me in jail for the rest of this 60 day period.

5. When I play with the dogs it tends to slam down onto the outside bony part of my ankle. I offer apologies for the inaccurate medical/anatomical terminology, but I can't name all the pieces of that part of the body accurately yet.

There are more things too, but so far those are the most frequently occurring ones. Let's move on to a more abstract discussion of being on a leash.

I know a lot of people who may as well be tied to their mobile phones/pagers/blackberries/etc.. I've had this experience myself and I did not like it at all. In the end, I think it's the same sort of tether, only more insidious. The modern interaction with phones and blackberries (someone's coined the term "crackberries") follows a progression from learning the quirks of the interface to being useful to being the default communication device to oh-shit-I-left-it-at-home, so I'll turn back around and go through another hour of rush-hour traffic to get it to if I don't answer it at 11pm Friday night I'll be having a chat with the boss when he gets back on Tuesday. I know a couple of people that stopped using their mobiles because it got to be too much and found out that all of a sudden everyone was trying to get in touch with them. Could it become cool to be unreachable immediately?

What about communicating strictly by SMS? My last firm did a lot of business with a character who was all over the place. One day he would drop by the office in a 3-piece suit and a ten thousand dollar watch to talk about the deal we were closing the next week in which he was a large participant, and then a couple of days later he's sending wire transfer instructions to his bankers from the beach in Rio de Janeiro during carnaval. This guy was a real piece of work. He was pretty funny in person - always smoking a cigar and throwing around thousand-__________ bills - but I stopped doing business with him once I saw his name on a couple of lists.

Personally I'm beginning to prefer e-mail. As can be seen in a number of recent investigations/trials/scandals/whatever, it leaves a quasi-written record of what's been said or agreed to. The phone is fine, but unless there's a system that records every conversation (like trading desks and certain other places in the banks and brokerages have), then I'll insist on an e-mail follow up.

I've gone off on somewhat of a tangent, but the bottom line is this: punishment is punishment, whether its manifestations include real leg chains or virtual ones. Don't be fooled.