Touchie Scrollie Yumminess

Okay— I suck. Let’s just get it out there so we can all feel safe and secure and comfortable in my extreme suckness.

Why, oh, why do I suck so much? Because I’m totally smitten, you guys.

It's true. It happened to me. I have Droid envy.

I fell pretty hard last night. I was at a private singing rehearsal for “Iolanthe” and, after the rehearsal, the conductor and I were kibitzing about this and that, and we got to chatting about how much weight she’d lost recently. She told me that she keeps tabs on her weight loss with her phone.

And then she pulled it out.

There were charts and graphs and colorful… I don’t know… things! It was all scrollie and touchie and pretty and I wanted to touch touch but I restrained myself and I just watched in amazement because it was all pretty yummy like.

“Her data plan must be off the fucking charts,” I said to myself.

“And the best part is,” she said, “I tax deduct my data plan!”

D’OH!

She has a gym app and a calorie-counting app on her Droid and, oh, that’s not fucking all, children. She pulled out a 100 calorie Chips Ahoy packet from her workout bag and she, wait for it, MOTHERFUCKING SCANNED THE UPC LABEL!

She. Scanned. It. With. Her. Phone.

“Isn’t that cool?” she asked? By the way, this woman is a mother of two and at least fifteen years my senior.

“Uh, yeah it’s cool,” I replied, the saliva pooling in my mouth, “can’t you see my pupils dilating?”

All the nutritional information for her bullshit cookies appeared on the screen. Her weight-loss graph (green) was going in the correct, downward direction. She was very proud of herself, even though she surreptitiously covered her starting weight with her thumb. I was very envious of her, and I could barely conceal my jealousy and petty rage as I pulled out my decrepit-looking flip phone to schedule our next rehearsal. My phone cannot scan anything. It does PTT, though. But I don’t, um, PTT with… anyone. So… uh… Yeah.

It does play a charming selection of Gilbert & Sullivan ring-tones when people call me, though, and that’s, well, entertaining. For. Me.

We all know my thing with phones. I’m as fickle with them as I am with eyeglasses. A new one every six or eight months or so. Christ, I’ve had twelve cars since I was sixteen—are you noticing a pattern here? With phones, though, I vacillate between wanting a simplistic object strictly for calls and texts, and then wanting some brick-like thing to sync my email and go online and have GPS and radio the moon landing crew and listen to podcasts and generally be super annoying with.

Oh, and a full QWERTY keyboard would be nice to have again. You know, because I’m a verbose sumbitch and texting with proper punctuation and proper verbiage isn’t easy on a traditional flip-phone. After all, my thumbs aren’t twelve years old anymore and, when they were, they certainly weren’t texting. They were, like, up my ass while I tried to do math homework.

I know that, if I had a Droid, I wouldn’t be scanning the labels of Chips Ahoy bags. I would just, you know, have a Droid. To have one. And my data plan would be pound-me-in-the-ass expensive, and I wouldn’t have the testiculosis to write it off as a tax-deduction, because the IRS scares me and gives me mouth Ebola. Maybe I would become the asshole I was afraid of becoming when I gave up my Nokia E71x. Or my Palm Treo. That I would be staring it in the face all the time and hearing its text and email blips go off in my sleep.

But, isn’t that the way in which the world is spinning? Aren’t we all going to become those assholes some day? Married to our data plans and our touchie-scrollie yumminess? Aren’t we all going to become cyborgs with those fucking things in our ears?

Probably. Oh well—- chips ahoy!