By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Here we are in Fayette County with quality of life that rivals any area in the Southeast, and yet we are rapidly falling behind in one aspect of the latest in life-style technology.

I'm referring to those handy dandy cell phones. They just don't work that well here, especially in the southern end of the county.

So here we are with a dilemma. We want to keep up with the Gwinnetians and have a cell phone for every member of the family, but we don't want a cell tower in every back yard.

After all, in many neighborhoods we've been busily burying our power lines, phone lines and TV cable so the landscape would be free of unsightly wiring and poles. And now we've got seven cell phone companies competing to serve us, and each one needs a grid of towers two or three miles apart.

It's not quite as bad as that sounds. Many of the towers that cell companies build can accommodate several other companies. If you put up a tower tall enough to cover a three-mile radius and you can put all seven phone companies on that one tower, you've eliminated seven other towers in the vicinity.

Neat, huh? Here's the catch. The more companies you want to serve with it, the taller the tower has to be. Also, it has to have more structure to support it. If your house sits on a hill, you might be able to see three or four such towers from your porch by the time Fayette has complete cellular coverage.

So whatever happened to all the talk about disguising towers to look like pine trees and telephone poles?

It's like this: The cell companies can do that, but towers that look like pine trees are limited in height (have you ever seen a 400-foot pine tree?) Now we're back to point one. You have to have more of them. Do they look enough like pine trees that you wouldn't mind having two or three of them in your neighborhood alone? I don't know.

Fayette Planning Commission members are going to be listening very carefully to your answers to such questions Aug. 20, and probably at future meetings as well. They're trying to come up with a master plan for cellular towers so the phone companies can make their money and you can keep your house and everybody will be happy.

And if you're thinking, "To heck with them making their money," think again. Federal law says they have to provide a certain level of coverage, period. If our answer is that we want Fayette blacked out from cell phone coverage, we're going to take a whipping in court.

There's going to have to be compromise. You can have lots of small towers or fewer tall towers that can be seen from farther away. No way around it. If you want to limit them to major highways to keep them away from most neighborhoods, the neighborhoods near the major highways are still going to have them, and those residents are going to be mad at the rest of you.

If you want to limit them to commercial and industrial zones, the cell phones are only going to work near the commercial and industrial zones. And there will still be neighborhoods near enough to those zones to be bothered by unsightly structures and blinking lights, and since they'll be limited to a smaller area, there will be lots and lots of them in those areas.

It would be nice if they could just erect one mega-tower, a couple of thousand feet high, right in the middle of the county. But that wouldn't work either. The reason they need towers every two or three miles is that the cell phones won't transmit any farther. You have to invent a cell phone that will transmit 20 miles, and then we wouldn't have to have any towers in Fayette at all.

This whole dilemma is just one of the many headaches that come from living in the most technologically advanced, most comfortable, richest, safest society in the history of the world.

Life's rough, ain't it?