ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (02-28-19)
I got a "smart phone" for Christmas, and I thought I would report on how I'm doing with it so far. To call it a smart phone in the first place is overstating things, because if it had any sense at all it would not be hanging out with me. But now I can do all sorts of things that I never could before. Want to know the correct time without looking at my watch? No problem! I simply turn on the phone, wait a while as it boots up, flashes the logo, tells me who I'm secured by, tells me who I'm powered by, says hello to me, then goes completely dark. I try to turn it on again but it's already still on, just messing with me and we share a laugh. I punch in my security code wrong twice and right once, and BINGO! It's later than I thought.
I can sext now! OOPS I tried to type "text," I swear. My fat fingers hit three incorrect letters each time I hit a button, and it's up to an algorithm to figure out what the hell I'm talking about. Or I can just use the words conveniently provided by the "auto-suggest," and the phone will tell me what it is I SHOULD be talking about. When I typed in "Let's go to the..." the auto-suggest suggested "police" and "hospital," so already this device knows me better than my parents did. If my train of thought has not actually left the station yet, I can just start out with "I," and keep picking out different words from the ever-changing selection until I have a sentence that the cell phone and I can both agree on. I have a sentence in my "drafts" folder that I am still working on, and should be completed by the end of this year.
I just remembered, I haven't set up my phone mail greeting yet. Not too many people call me, so I can conduct most of the conversation right in the greeting. "Hi, you've reached Rick. If this is who I think it is, I know what you're calling about, but I don't want You-Know-Who to find out so call me back. If this is You-Know-Who, the answer is still 'maybe,' but it's not a hard 'maybe' so don't let it get around." The reason I don't get many calls is not because I'm unpopular, it's because everyone knows I won't have my phone on. I don't want to run down the battery. My wife says I should just charge the phone when the battery starts to die, like everyone else. But I never remember, and my battery dies, and then I forget to go to the funeral. What if I'm on Mount Everest, and there's a landslide, and I think I'm definitely going to perish, and I try to call the hotel to cancel my next night's reservation and get my deposit back, and the phone is dead?
The other reason is that I don't want to be one of the cellphone zombies that walk around the Earth bumping into each other like human pinballs, living their entire life through a 3" by 5" screen. The irony is that you can use your iPhone to look up anything you need to know, but people using an iPhone very rarely look up. WATCH IT- You're about to fall into the Grand Canyon! Oops, too late, but these people are so good with their phones that as they're falling, on the way down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon they have already called to arrange a FREE mattress delivery.
I'm finding it hard to trust a phone that doesn't have an antenna. There I am buried under that landslide and I have no cell service. If I had an antenna I could at least stick it up and wave it around so someone would see me and rescue me. And it's heavier than I'm used to, so my right pants pocket droops and it looks like I'm lopsided from the waist down. And I have so much to learn. How long is it acceptable to carry around the instruction book? The book weighs a pound and a half because it's translated into every single damned language and some languages are heavier than others. My wife said she would teach me how to swipe my phone, but wouldn't it be less risky to just to buy one?
Surely I jest. The phone is a tool, and a useful and powerful one. You can look up anything in two seconds. Who was that annoying kid who played for the Angels and ALWAYS got a hit against the Yankees no matter what Cy Young winner we had pitching at the time? And how many times has my wife saved us by booting up her mobile GPS while we were trying to find the hotel? Even though as I've explained many times, there is a difference between getting lost and exploring "alternate, scenic, time-consuming routes." I just think think that the world would be a lot healthier if I used my smart phone a little more, and the rest of the world used it a little less. Oh yeah: David Eckstein.
I've survived all this time without a smart phone, as hard as that is to believe. I didn't have one when I was a seven year-old kid playing with toy soldiers in the basement, where my Mom let me and my imagination percolate for hours. Now it seems like every child has a smart phone issued at birth, and it will remain to be seen whether it takes a toll on ideas and thoughts when someone else thinks them for you. Will children still play with toy soldiers with their hands, or simply watch themon a little screen? If not, those toy soldiers will have lost their fiercest war.
I got a "smart phone" for Christmas, and I thought I would report on how I'm doing with it so far. To call it a smart phone in the first place is overstating things, because if it had any sense at all it would not be hanging out with me. But now I can do all sorts of things that I never could before. Want to know the correct time without looking at my watch? No problem! I simply turn on the phone, wait a while as it boots up, flashes the logo, tells me who I'm secured by, tells me who I'm powered by, says hello to me, then goes completely dark. I try to turn it on again but it's already still on, just messing with me and we share a laugh. I punch in my security code wrong twice and right once, and BINGO! It's later than I thought.
I can sext now! OOPS I tried to type "text," I swear. My fat fingers hit three incorrect letters each time I hit a button, and it's up to an algorithm to figure out what the hell I'm talking about. Or I can just use the words conveniently provided by the "auto-suggest," and the phone will tell me what it is I SHOULD be talking about. When I typed in "Let's go to the..." the auto-suggest suggested "police" and "hospital," so already this device knows me better than my parents did. If my train of thought has not actually left the station yet, I can just start out with "I," and keep picking out different words from the ever-changing selection until I have a sentence that the cell phone and I can both agree on. I have a sentence in my "drafts" folder that I am still working on, and should be completed by the end of this year.
I just remembered, I haven't set up my phone mail greeting yet. Not too many people call me, so I can conduct most of the conversation right in the greeting. "Hi, you've reached Rick. If this is who I think it is, I know what you're calling about, but I don't want You-Know-Who to find out so call me back. If this is You-Know-Who, the answer is still 'maybe,' but it's not a hard 'maybe' so don't let it get around." The reason I don't get many calls is not because I'm unpopular, it's because everyone knows I won't have my phone on. I don't want to run down the battery. My wife says I should just charge the phone when the battery starts to die, like everyone else. But I never remember, and my battery dies, and then I forget to go to the funeral. What if I'm on Mount Everest, and there's a landslide, and I think I'm definitely going to perish, and I try to call the hotel to cancel my next night's reservation and get my deposit back, and the phone is dead?
The other reason is that I don't want to be one of the cellphone zombies that walk around the Earth bumping into each other like human pinballs, living their entire life through a 3" by 5" screen. The irony is that you can use your iPhone to look up anything you need to know, but people using an iPhone very rarely look up. WATCH IT- You're about to fall into the Grand Canyon! Oops, too late, but these people are so good with their phones that as they're falling, on the way down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon they have already called to arrange a FREE mattress delivery.
I'm finding it hard to trust a phone that doesn't have an antenna. There I am buried under that landslide and I have no cell service. If I had an antenna I could at least stick it up and wave it around so someone would see me and rescue me. And it's heavier than I'm used to, so my right pants pocket droops and it looks like I'm lopsided from the waist down. And I have so much to learn. How long is it acceptable to carry around the instruction book? The book weighs a pound and a half because it's translated into every single damned language and some languages are heavier than others. My wife said she would teach me how to swipe my phone, but wouldn't it be less risky to just to buy one?
Surely I jest. The phone is a tool, and a useful and powerful one. You can look up anything in two seconds. Who was that annoying kid who played for the Angels and ALWAYS got a hit against the Yankees no matter what Cy Young winner we had pitching at the time? And how many times has my wife saved us by booting up her mobile GPS while we were trying to find the hotel? Even though as I've explained many times, there is a difference between getting lost and exploring "alternate, scenic, time-consuming routes." I just think think that the world would be a lot healthier if I used my smart phone a little more, and the rest of the world used it a little less. Oh yeah: David Eckstein.
I've survived all this time without a smart phone, as hard as that is to believe. I didn't have one when I was a seven year-old kid playing with toy soldiers in the basement, where my Mom let me and my imagination percolate for hours. Now it seems like every child has a smart phone issued at birth, and it will remain to be seen whether it takes a toll on ideas and thoughts when someone else thinks them for you. Will children still play with toy soldiers with their hands, or simply watch themon a little screen? If not, those toy soldiers will have lost their fiercest war.
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