The One Percent of Battery Life on Our Phones

Have you ever been part of the one percent? The one percent, that is, of battery life that shows up on your phone right in the middle of an important phone call, or while you’re looking up directions to a friend’s place and don’t know where you are.

Casey Cep talks about this specific kind of experience in her latest column for Pacific Standard:

My own quest for power has left me pleading with bartenders, begging train conductors and doormen, bribing baristas and store clerks. The desperation of those final moments, just before the phone gives up the ghost, has driven me to make best friends of strangers. It’s a particular kind of humiliation to explain why you won’t be able to make it back to your hotel without an app or why you don’t know your friend’s address because you didn’t write it down; it’s a decidedly modern addiction to confess that yes, you are so addicted to your phone that you can’t possibly live an entire hour without it glowing warmly in your hand.

Looking around cafés and coffee shops, I see that I’m not alone. There’s a specific kind of side eye reserved for the students who hog outlets for hours at a time, camping out as if they don’t have electricity of their own at home. The fight for outlets is so fierce at airports and train stations that I won’t even bother scavenging. Who can forget the images that appeared after Hurricane Sandy, when eight million New Yorkers all crowded around lampposts and power bars for what little power was still in service or provided by generators?

Cep points us to a plethora of gadgets that are on the market to help protect us from ever having to plead with a stranger for some power, including solar battery packs like the ones recommended from our pals at the Wirecutter, and even a purse that can charge your mobile device (though if I’m going to carry something to charge my phone, it might as well just be my charger?).

Seeing the red bar pop up on my phone always makes me super nervous (I have an iPhone 4s), so I rarely let it go under 20 percent and charge it often: every night before I go to bed, and during whatever minutes it takes me to get ready before I head out for an event at night (though that has never stopped my phone from mysteriously draining all of its battery life).

Cep ends her column with a look towards the future — a future where people would laugh about the idea that we ever worried about this, because everyone is walking around with wireless devices powered by atmospheric energy.

Photo: Ged Carrol

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