Can You Hear Me Now?/Playing With
Basic Trope: Fictional cellphones are either more unreliable than Real Life cellphones, or fictional characters are less likely to possess them than in the real world.
- Straight: Alice is trying to contact Bob but he is in the middle of a forest and thus out of reach of a cellphone tower.
- Exaggerated: Alice is trying to contact Bob using a cellphone but cannot find a signal, despite the fact that they are both in downtown New York.
- Justified: Bob is in an out-of-reach location where it genuinely is difficult to get a cellphone signal (such as a basement, the middle of a desert or Antarctica).
- Inverted:
- Alice's cellphone is so powerful it is capable of doing things no cellphone should be able to do.
- Alice has a satellite phone.
- Subverted: Despite being out of an urban area, Bob is still within cellphone range and Alice's call gets through.
- Doubly Subverted: The line is unclear, however, and cuts out before Alice can impart her message to Bob.
- Parodied: Despite the fact that they all have working cellphones, in an emergency none of the characters even thinks about using them to contact any of the others.
- Deconstructed: The uselessness of cellphones in general means many companies go bankrupt and millions of workers are put out of jobs.
- Reconstructed: The uselessness of cellphones in general puts pressure on cellphone companies to finally improve service by building more powerful towers. Those that do not go bankrupt.
- Zig Zagged: Bob repeatedly goes into areas of bad phone service.
- Averted: Fictional cellphones are exactly as reliable and widely-possessed as they are in Real Life.
- Lampshaded: "Damn, the reception out here is terrible."
- Invoked: Bob intentionally gives Alice a malfunctioning cellphone so that she will not be able to contact anyone in an emergency.
- Defied:
- Alice is Crazy Prepared and always has a working phone with her. She might even carry several.
- Alternately, Alice has a satellite phone which always works.
- Or, Alice and Bob have radios and know how to use them.
- Discussed: "Don't you have a cell phone?" "Yeah, but all the cellphone towers around here can't get a signal if you're more than two feet away!"
- Conversed: "Wow, the cellphone service providers these characters have suck."
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