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| Lame. Lame. Lame. |
It was a pretty ordinary day. I was trying to make a call on
my landline phone when after a few frustrating moments, I realized something.
This phone is dumb. Really, really dumb.
To be fair, I wasn’t helping. I was trying to dial too fast
and entered in the wrong phone number over and over. But there was no way to go
back and correct the final number 3 when I meant to hit the number 6. When I
did it again, that’s when it hit me. Here’s this piece of technology that is
three times the size of my cell phone, has been around for 50 years more, and they
still haven’t thought to add an erase key to the thing. Talk about resting on your laurels!
Granted, I should manage to dial correctly, but would it
kill landline phone manufacturers to add
an erase key so I didn’t have to redial
ten numbers? We’re not exactly talking about sequencing the human
genome, here.
I had to face facts - my phone dialing skills have severely atrophied
since everyone in my life is on speed dial. It’s part of the downside to our smarty pants
phones. My phone may be completely
destroying my ability to not just dial, but to read maps, memorize strings of
numbers, or remember faces if they haven’t been added to my phone’s address
book.
As a matter of fact, don’t tell her, but I’m not even sure
what my own mother’s phone number is because I never dial it, I just ask my
phone to call her. These days I ask my phone all kinds of things. She (yes,
she) answers silly questions like “how much wood would a wood chuck chuck?” and
“what is the airspeed of an unladed swallow?”
She stores way too much information and has enough computing power to
send a man to the moon, and yet is perfectly satisfied with letting me play
scrabble for an hour.
Our daughters have always lived in a world where phones
didn’t just sit there and wait to ring or to dial out. Their phones have been
personal assistants, music machines, game consoles, and cameras. I have a
feeling our landline phone won’t be one of the things we pass down to them.
But it will make a good conversation piece about the days
when we used to have to get the number perfectly right or else end up talking
to the Comal County Sheriff’s Department.
I’m just saying…
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