OTTUMWA — Don’t get me wrong. The cell phone is a valuable invention.

But it’s a tool with a price and I’m not talking only about monthly bills and batteries.

Remember when a cell phone was for an emergency on a road trip? Either that’s not true or else half the drivers on the road today are in a state of continual emergency.

And they are in that “state” because driving and talking on the phone is distracted driving, which is an emergency about to happen.

Distracted drivers have nearly hit me many times. With a cell phone plastered to his ear, one oncoming driver looked at me and appeared to slow down as if waiting for me to go past him so he could turn left into a driveway.

Still creeping along, he started a slow, one-handed turn across my lane and was still talking on the phone. He acted as if I wasn’t there.

Some people would say this can happen with any driver. I suppose so.

But what bothers me is the “distant” look on that driver’s face. His eyes observed the situation but his mind was elsewhere. It’s like he was the only player in his own private computer game and I was part of the computer-generated landscape.

And I’m not speculating when I say that. I know this is true because I’ve been a distracted driver.

I scared myself one day when I answered my cell phone while driving. After a few minutes of discussion, I drove through a stop sign. No traffic, no witnesses. I was lucky.

I recognize the look other drivers have while chatting on a cell phone. It’s the look I remember from watching people use a land line.

You remember, don’t you? For example, your older sister, a teen, is cuddled in a corner of the living room with the phone, listening, focusing on her boyfriend’s voice. She’s safe, entertained and the rest of the world is on hold.

It’s not like that on the road. Please, pull over to take a call. Sure, it takes a few minutes. An accident takes less time to happen. Cleaning up afterward takes a lot longer.

I’ve had a nightmare about wearing a cell phone on one ear, a two-way radio on the other, with a holster computer on one hip. Reminds me of the “Borg” from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” where the separation between machine and human disappears.

And you know what else? I’m not comfortable putting 47 million things about my personal business into a tiny gizmo I can easily lose. (This is assuming I can see well enough to program it!)