Smarty-pants Phone

I moved. I got an iPhone. I discovered that I got crappy reception at my house. I used my phone sparingly and only when it was connected to my in-house network. My smart phone sat idle for the better part of five weeks.
   Then I got a job. A job that takes me out of the house.
   I now have reception. And 3G connection. And I can do stuff with my iPhone. Like text effectively, action which my sister is all over. Me, not so much. I can download apps from the App Store. Wheee! If I use the compass I can tell which way I'm facing, which was always a question for me before I got this phone. Now I can tell the hobos who approach me which way North is. I can calculate a tip using the calculator, or just use my brain like I did when I was a waiter. I did use GarageBand to create a few ring tones, but there are tons of other things my iPhone can do that I'm completely ignorant of. And, perhaps, willfully so.
   Except...
   I discovered that I can take notes on my iPhone. Type things into a notepad and preserve them forever. So when I'm sitting in a restaurant observing the local fauna it seems like I'm texting, but I'm really jotting a few quick observations to myself. It's like when I use my digital recorder to preserve my pearls of wisdom, except not quite so 'douche-y' as a friend of mine put it. Although I can't say I think obliviously texting in a restaurant is any less douchebaggery than talking into a digital recorder.*

So here are a few notes I've taken in the last few days since I discovered this feature.

From Jim's - a chain of diners in San Antonio:
   'Cooked fish smells almost as bad as raw fish.'
   '300 lb. man makes a dramatic point of ordering wheat toast with his chicken-fried steak breakfast. It's not going to help.'
   'Hefty waitress constantly snacking. Wonder if she helped herself to some of my hash browns?'

From the gas station:
   'Why do bald guys with tattoos always look like they're going in to rob the place?'
   'Who rents videos from a Red Box outside a Valero? People who wear terrycloth shorts in public.'
   'Terrycloth shorts should never be worn in public.'

From the Wal-Mart parking lot:
   'Terrycloth shorts should never be worn in public.'
   'Is everyone here morbidly obese?'
   'Is anyone else looking at me and asking 'is everyone here morbidly obese?''
   'Have they stopped making toilet paper? Everyone has a twenty-four pack.'
   'What percentage of Wal-Mart workers smoke versus the average population?'

And so it goes...


* or iPhone, since it will also do digial voice recording. Steve Jobs' gnomes are nothing if not thorough.

Talk To Me

You ever get a text from someone and you wonder why they don't just call? If you have you're probably someone born in the last century. The 20th.
   I'm a man 'of a certain age' which means that I don't have a whole lot of friends who use text messages. It's not that they don't know how, they're all smart guys, it's that they would really rather not. There's a bland impersonality to a text message that puts off people like me. Time was not everyone in the world was connected with a cell phone. We even had to carry change for a pay phone, believe it or not, in case of emergencies.
   I remember when I was growing up, everyone in my family just sort of stopped answering the phone. At least when my sister was in the house, because chances were very good any incoming call would be for her, and if she was indoors she would certainly be the first to get to the phone. Which you couldn't carry with you back then, and was usually hung on the wall in the kitchen in most homes. Our one family phone was practically glued to my sister's head for years as she carried on with her friends.
   But engaging in all that talking built relationships. My sister is still best friends with her best friend from middle school and high school, and I think those insanely long phone conversations had a whole lot to do with that.
   I was sitting on the couch next to one of my nieces the other day, and she was carrying on a text 'conversation' with one or several of her friends on her phone. This is not the same thing as talking on the phone, you can't hear the other person, the sighs of exasperation, the nervous giggle, the angry tones. Typing is not conversing. And, while she's halfway engaged with her friends via text, she's halfway engaged with the other people in the same room with her. Arguably worse than a sullen teen who just disappears into her room
   I read an article the other day that stated kids these days* prefer the safety and relative anonymity of a text message over the immediacy and intimacy of a phone conversation. They feel actually talking to someone reveals too much of themselves. This is the same generation who thinks nothing of posting drunk frat-party photos online for all the world to see and enjoy for decades to come. A nip-slip or dropped trou in living color is okay to share, but a phone call is too intimate. I can't figure that one out.
   I wonder if people said the same thing about the phone when it started going into homes? 'You know, if you want to talk to me, you can just come over.'

* I love saying that, it makes me seem like my grandfather