As I sit here on my screened-in lanai (the word for “porch” in SW Florida) trying to post a new post to my website from my iPhone 6, I can’t escape the irony of trying to do it well. I never thought my Internet life would come to this. After all, in my generation the phone was something you used as a last resort to call somebody up and tell them you’re on your way home, or ask what time dinner was, or find out if it’s even safe to come home at all. The telephone was something mounted to the kitchen wall or next to the bed.
Back then, if you were a teenager and got “grounded” for sneaking out your bedroom window last Saturday night only to end up passed out in the back yard for your neighbors to see on Sunday morning, telephone privileges were the first thing to go – no phone and no TV was the maximum punishment.
I guess that makes me an old-timer – I remember party lines, busy signals and a lot of wrong numbers, usually because the person on either end was dyslexic before anyone recognized it. There was no call-waiting or voicemail. In those days we had to memorize and remember phone numbers. We carried phone numbers written on the back of bar napkins and ratty business cards around in our wallet, sometimes for years. I can still remember my high-school girlfriend’s phone number and the phone number of the house I grew up in. In those days houses had phones, not people.
Not so today. The only phone number I’ve memorized is my own. If I lost my phone and couldn’t speed-dial my way out of it, I’d be up the creek without a paddle. That’s shit’s creek, by the way.
So so as I sit here trying to type on a 3 inch screen with thumbs the size of spatulas I can hear a mature businessman’s voice screaming inside my head that I’ve got too many better things to do with my time than play with my iPhone. I just wanted to know if it could really be done…if I could actually post an article to my website “on the go”.
And, apparently, so I can.
That’s how it’s done these days. We connect with everything “on the fly” from a phone. As only primates with opposable thumbs, we’ve figured out how to reach the world with our two thumbs and a palm-sized piece of blingy hardware.
And that’s how I did this blog post. It took twenty minutes.
