Smartphones

Ever since having to use a phone to call one of you EHHS girls for a date, my relationship with phones has been, at best, a mixed bag. I've never been one to curl up with a phone and talk mindlessly for hours.

Until I settled on a steady girl at EH, or rather she settled on me, I would pace, dry sweaty palms, and fight dry throat before calling my intended date. Then, within a few moments, everything was O.K. As is often said, "this, too, shall pass" and it did.

However, not much later, about the time I left the house to take on the world by myself, the telephone took on another status...an extreme irritant. Siding salesmen, newspaper subscriptions, and hundreds of other dopey propositions started coming in on my phone...and those were the days before you could switch off the ringer, dump to voice mail, or screen with caller ID. Working with a large corporation with far-flung divisions, wide-spread internal interests, and an array of customers introduced yet another level of telephone irritation. In pretty short order, I came to view the telephone more as nuisance than anything else and sought to live life as free from them as possible.

You may have noticed that I put a link to DILBERT along the upper, right side panel. Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, has been amazingly locked in on modern-day corporate nuttiness since the mid-1990s, demonstrating daily that neither clarity nor truth need many words to convey their message. Recently, he did a couple of panels on the current telephone fad, "smart phones." I look to DILBERT ( & Adams) to render an accurate portrait of many things we see being breathlessly touted in TV ads these days. I think he may have done it yet again, this time on the underlying truth of smart phones.

Wireless internet access has always been a beguiling prospect unfortunately, plagued by a number of technical limitations. Maybe it still is.

Adios