Everyone who is sick of hearing about my new phone raise your hand. Never mind that you were warned weeks ago you would be not only sick, but heartily sick — just raise your hand. In the interest of full disclosure and just for the record, I have my own hand raised.
The phone in question, I am delighted to say, is behaving more or less as it is supposed to. It makes and receives calls, except when incoming calls go mysteriously and inexplicably straight to voicemail. It will take a photograph and then magically transport it through the ether in a process that I don’t fully understand. Ha Ha. “Don’t fully understand” is a little technology humor. I don’t have the foggiest idea of how a picture is transported by phone and strongly suspect it involves forces outside the realm of nature. The happy news is, I don’t need to fully understand how it works. As long as it does.
It also (cue fanfare) texts. Oh, how I have come to love texting. This is a girl who went from disdaining texting and texters and texting contests and every crazy text-specific abbreviation to someone who has the busiest thumbs in west central Ohio.
It does have one feature I have struggled with. This is more technology-based humor. It has hundreds of features I have struggled with. It also has hundreds of features that I have yet to discover. It’s upsetting/terrifying/humiliating/to be expected that my phone appears to be approximately 100 times smarter than I am. In what must be the height of ridiculousness, I hesitate to open any new apps or try anything new with it because I am afraid this will somehow disable or overwhelm the phone. There is something overwhelmed here for sure, and it ain’t the phone.
But little by little I am getting more comfortable with the phone. I now believe that punching “favorites” instead of “recents” will not launch nuclear weapons. I now believe that storing even a single photograph will not overtax the memory to the point the phone physically implodes. I now believe I do not have to lug my iPad everywhere because using Google Maps on my iPad is entirely different from and utterly superior to using Google Maps on my iPhone. (But the picture is bigger.) And here is one thing I definitely believe. I now believe that you should not try to use the fingerprint feature to open your phone if you have been doing a little household chore and have managed to get Super Glue on your finger. For all your phone knows, this is Freddy Krueger’s fingerprint and it is not letting him in. Finally, a belief for which I have empiric proof.
All that is the good news. But here is the bad news. Now that the communication beast has been placated, it appears my laptop computer is getting ready to roll over and die. This is not, as you might expect, happy or welcome news. It is, in short, as close to disaster as I care to come. My entire brain is on my laptop. Everything speck of knowledge I possess is wrapped up in its motherboard and hard drive and a Microsoft Access database. Every Internet favorite, my way-too-voluminous email address book, the scheduled banking business, an incredible long-standing record of Free Cell wins … all of it is on that computer.
My current laptop incorporates a very nice symmetry. It is about ten years old and weighs about ten pounds. This, of course, does not approach my previous record when I had a laptop that was 14 years old and weighed 114 pounds. It was a monster. Trying to figure out how to use it as a mobile device exercised your intellect and your biceps at the same time. It was older and weighed more than the young man who sold me this one. I have seen the new computers. Not surprisingly at all, I do not care for the new computers. They have weird large pictures on them instead of sensible little icons. They have strange ways, unknowable ways really, of making you save stuff and find stuff and other stuff. They do not, and just let me repeat that, they do not have DVD players. They are, in short, different. And with this new phone, I’m full up on different.
