The first phone I ever had spent it’s entire life on a tiny table next to the front door of my one room place. It was plugged into the wall and, since it’s cord was very short, conversation and mobility did not exist in the same sentence. Not only that but, to make a call, I had to stick my finger into one of ten holes and rotate said finger in a clockwise direction seven to ten times - one rotation for each digit in the phone number.
Fast forward, and skip over several technological evolutions to present time and the phone I have today. I've already overcome my angst over certain terms. Oh yeah . . . it used to raise my grammatical hackles to hear the word “text” used as a verb! But I’m over that. In fact, I've even grown to accept the word “sex” as a verb.
But that’s a whole other conversation, now isn’t it? This one’s about my phone - I’ll try to leave sex out of it.
I converted to one of those text phones a while back. This, so I could communicate with my son. But alas, that phone was apparently not "smart" since all it did was make calls, take pictures, act as my alarm clock and text. It finally broke down and had to be replaced so I went ahead and upgraded to a “smart” phone. My new android can do everything except wash the dogs, do the dishes and cut the grass. Which you’d think would be great, right? But I’ve come to realize that I should probably go to smart phone training school in order to make friends with the thing. In the meantime I muddle along, trying my best to figure it out.
Take texting for example. My phone has a feature called swipe where I can rub the aforementioned finger along certain letters and it picks the word it thinks is closest to what I swiped. If it thinks I chose the wrong word, it replaces my word with one it feels more accurately represents the thing I want to say. It also has something called talk-to-text where I can talk into it and it transcribes my words into a text message.
So there I was trying to talk to my daughter via text, working frantically to hold up my end of the conversation while she was texting faster than I can even talk. That’s about the time when - quite by accident - I discovered another wonderful feature of my phone, one that converts English to another language. And it does this no matter what method I use as input.
So Holly’s on her own phone trying to figure out why I’m suddenly speaking Spanish. Meanwhile, I’m on my phone hitting any button I can to get back to English. I have yet to realize that I even have a language button, let alone the fact that it acts as a toggle, moving from English to Spanish. From Spanish to what looks like Kanji. From Kanji to what very well might be Swahili and from there into . . . I’m thinking . . . Korean? Beats the heck out of me. I keep switching from Swipe to Talk-to-Text, trying to make things right while erroneously hitting the language button over and over again, rolling through languages faster than the rotations of Linda Blair's head.
By now I'm laughing so hard my eyes are watering and I’m close to wetting my pants. Holly’s texts back to me have stopped making sense and she’s reverted to questions like “WTF, Mom!” Or “Mom . . . have you been drinking?” The very last thing I said to her went something like this: “desazon m que menja hilinger. And peanuts.”
That was right before she called me. “Mom, what are you doing?”
“I have no clue! Isn’t it obvious!”
Needless to say, that was the most fun I’ve had with technology in a very long time! Don’t ask me what the “and peanuts” was supposed to have meant. I have no idea.
So the other day my friend, Beth, sent a great email that I could totally relate to. In it were some of the other wonderful ways our new “smart phones” have enhanced communication. Take a look:
Ain't technology fun!?
