My Cell Phone

I have a love-hate relationship with my cell phone.

I like that I can call Mary from the store to ask if she prefers high pulp or low pulp and that in an emergency, I can reach people in a hurry. I’m thrilled that Daughter Two can check in before she leaves one place and when she gets to the next one.  And it’s been critical a couple times when Daughter One had car or weather problems coming over the pass.

I do like that I can check e-mails while I’m sitting in a remote airport and that when I’m teaching, I can flip the phone open during breaks and check for urgent messages.

What I’m less sanguine about is the overabundance of applications included in the package. I’m never going to use most of them (when I need a photo, I use an actual camera, thank you) and they just muddy the waters.  It takes me three tries to make a call because if you so much as breathe on the wrong key, you’re off and running to some website you’ve never heard of.

And you might note that I mentioned ‘check e-mails,’ and not ‘send e-mails.’  There’s a simple reason for this.  In order to accommodate a screen size that’s still woefully inadequate for most of the apps, the keyboard has been reduced to a tiny minefield of wrong letters.  I could no sooner type out a useful message on this keyboard with my sausage-shaped fumble fingers than I could fit my caboose into one of those clown chairs at a day care open house.

I swear I’m not a Luddite. I am in favor of technical progress.  But my preference is for appliances that do one or two things well over pieces of hooha that do a hundred things half-baked.

I know this places me firmly in the geriatric gnome category. So be it. I think things should work.