Dumber Than My Phone

What with navigating around F***book (I’m still a bit … okay, a lot boggled) and surviving fiscal year end, I’ve not done much writing of late. I miss it, but that’s okay – I have a week’s vacation coming soon and a project in mind. That, however, is another post.

As part of my ongoing plan to become a social media savvy celebrity author, I turned in the old flip phone and bought a Smartphone last weekend. It’s a basic model compared to the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies floating around out there, but I have a pre-paid mobile account and didn’t want to commit (there’s that fear again) to a contract with my upgrade. So this little fellow is a Motorola E (or something), powered by Google Android, which freaks me out because the androids on Star Trek thought they were better than humans and, if not for JT Kirk and Co., would have taken over the world … I digress. Mr. Moto is less a phone than it is a tiny computer. Once I figure out how to drive it, it will check my email, keep my appointments, snap photos, upload said photos to FB, send and receive text messages, reflect my scintillating personality by way of varied ringtones and desktop wallpaper, stash any apps I accidentally download, and probably cost me way more than the thirty dollars per month I’ve budgeted for the privilege of ownership.

Yes, I’m totally lost. Well, not totally. Ter found the user’s guide online – via the big computer rather than the “mobile device” – so between us we deduced how to answer an incoming call after the first experiment failed. The device started ringing … actually, it started to play a boogie tune that had me grooving until I saw our landline number on the screen. Whoa, call display! How cool is that? But once startled into action, I couldn’t figure out how to connect to the call! So off it went to voice mail, and off I went to consult the manual.

Handy things, those manuals. Too bad hard copies don’t come with the product; switching from the computer screen to the phone screen can start a migraine faster than cheezies with a chocolate chaser. I’ve yet to delve much deeper into it than skimming the basics, but at least I can answer a call or choose to ignore it and then retrieve the voice mail. I was able to record an outgoing message by remembering which buttons to push once I call my own number; it helps to have a similar VM system at work. And the camera … let’s be truthful here. I bought it for the camera, for spontaneous pics and fast uploads; again, part of Ru’s cunning Media Savvy Plan. I adore my little digital Canon, but I don’t carry it with me every day and I have missed golden weekday photo ops, like the streetlamp lying on the boulevard. It looked like the eye of the Martian spaceship in the Gene Barry version of War of the Worlds and I would have taken a picture if only. So I guess I’ve really bought a camera that has a phone rather than a phone that has a camera, so does it matter if I can’t get Mr. Moto to play Darth Vader’s Imperial March when my father calls?

In this intellectual game of chicken with my phone, you bet it does.