We Drove 45 Minutes To Sit Next To Each Other On Our Phones — The Said It Collection
Let me paint you a picture.
Table for four. Nice restaurant. Forty five minute drive to get there. Everyone dressed. Everyone present in body.
Nobody present in spirit.
The menus got looked at. The phones got looked at more. The food arrived. The phones came out for the photo. The food got cold. The scroll continued. The check came. Everyone put their phones away long enough to figure out who was paying.
We drove home mostly in silence. Which was fine because we had not really talked at dinner either.
This is not a judgment. This is a confession. I have been at that table. I have been on that phone. I have been the person who looked up from a screen and realized I missed the conversation I drove forty five minutes to have.
The things I actually wrote on the designs because I could not say them out loud.
Presently elsewhere.
That one stopped me when I wrote it. Because it is the most honest two words for what we all do now. We show up. We sit down. We are technically there. And we are somewhere else entirely.
Unless you want to eat your phone. Put it down.
That one is for the dining room wall. Or the restaurant table. Or the family group chat. Wherever it lands the hardest.
The Wi-Fi password is put the phone down.
Every host who has ever wanted to say this but did not. Now there is a card for it.
We are eating. Not scrolling.
The sign we all need. The sign nobody puts up. Until now.
You paid for the view. You are looking at your phone.
This one I wrote at a restaurant with floor to ceiling windows and a skyline that nobody at our table saw because everyone was on their screen. Forty dollar entrees. Zero dollars worth of presence.
Dinner. We used to have to actually talk to each other.
The nostalgia one. The one that makes people laugh and then go quiet for a second because they remember when dinner was just dinner.
Put it down. Eat. Scroll on your own time.
The direct one. No softening. No apology.
Remember when family time was talking to each other. Everyone here is somewhere else. Come back.
That last one. Come back. That is not sarcasm. That is a genuine ask. Dressed up in the State the Obvious voice but real underneath it.
Why I made these into cards.
Because I could not say any of this out loud at the table without starting an argument or ruining the dinner that was already not happening.
But a card on the table. A print on the wall. A Wi-Fi password that says what we are all thinking.
That says it without saying it. And sometimes that is the only way it gets heard.
The Said It Collection — Eating and Phones Edition is in the shop. Ten designs. Everything everyone thinks at that table. Finally on your wall.
Obviously. — Kim
