Operator! Give me the number for 911.

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-- Homer Simpson

This is what it's like being a parent one decade into the new millennium.

First, the good news.

Your teenager has a cell phone and carries it everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.

On any given afternoon or evening, 20 percent of the teenagers in Augusta are carrying on conversations in the bathroom, though I suspect that's to keep conversations away from adult ears.

That's not the way it was when you and I were teens.

No, back in what my son calls "the frontier days," whenever you left home, your parents were left to worry themselves sick until you returned.

Those were the days. Nobody wore seat belts. Dashboards were metal. Cars were big-bumpered and dangerous.

Sometimes the folks forced dimes (and later quarters) into your pockets in some sort of frantic parting gesture, reminding you to use a "pay phone" if you got into a jam.

Today?

You can punch a few buttons and call your kid's cell immediately.

Some of them even have GPS devices. If you are tech-savvy enough, I'm sure you could access their whereabouts on some computer mapping program. ("He's in the subdivision near the school ..." "No, wait, he's headed home. Should be here in five ..." Or, "He hasn't budged in a while, must be in a public restroom ...")

It's a wonderful sense of security, right?

Wrong.

That's because teenagers' cell phones apparently work only half the time.

They miss calls. They drop calls. Ringtones mysteriously move to "mute." (It must be that "Parent App.")

And the batteries die every other day.

A third of the time when our son calls to "check in" on weekend social forays, he's using someone else's phone.

"Mine's dead," he'll say, as though it should be expected from this small, scuffed piece of battered technology.

For the record, in a decade as a cell-packing adult, my phone has never gone dead.

So, what should be a grand and secure time for the average, overbearing, overcaring adult has actually turned into just a new version of the age-old, old-age worry game.

Our children don't know what it's like to worry. They don't know what it's like to fall asleep propped up on the couch trying to make it look like you were watching TV when you really want to know when they get home ... because you won't sleep for good until that happens.

If they did, they'd call. A lot.

And we'd be there to answer.

Unless we were in the bathroom.