I got a smart phone the other day, and now I feel more stupid than ever.
I guess you could say it was vanity that kept me from getting a phone earlier. I probably wanted the smartest thing in the house at least to have a heartbeat. I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to do that kind of self-analysis.
If I ever thought that I was smarter than the devices that live with me, then I’m guilty of being not only stupid but delusional. After all, I plug the fridge into the outlet on the wall and it figures out how to keep things cold. Across the room from the fridge is the coffee maker. I plug it into the same kind of outlet on the wall and it makes my coffee hot. How do they do it? Ask the fridge or the coffee maker — maybe they know. I sure don’t.
My daughter Jenny has been after me for years to get a smart phone, but I have dug in my heels until now. She can’t imagine how anybody gets through the day without a phone that tells them what to do and when to do it.
“You’ll love it,” she has told me. “It can do anything you want it to do for you.”
And I have known all along that she is right. After all, whenever we watch an old movie together and I mutter something like, “I wonder how old Sylvester Stallone was when he filmed this first Rocky movie?” I can barely get the sentence out before Jenny answers, “He was 30. He wrote the film himself in three days when he was 29. Did you know he’s only five-foot-nine?”
I thought he was taller. But then, I thought I was taller, too.
She can tell me more — how many Rocky films he made altogether, how much he weighed in each one, how much money each movie grossed in the box office — but I shush her because Rocky is standing in the alley asking Father Carmine to throw down a blessing on him before the big fight, and I love that part.
Anyway, the nice people at the phone company told me recently that I have qualified for a free upgrade, and my old dumb phone was looking pretty ratty, so I decided to take the leap to a smart phone. It seemed like the smart thing to do, especially when Jenny told me I could listen to music on it. It would be cool to finally dump all those cassette tapes.
After the guy at the phone store gave me a quick tour of all the smart things my new phone could do for me, he handed me the gizmo and said, “There you go; you’re all set.”
I asked him if it came with a manual and he shook his head.
“They don’t use a paper manual anymore,” he said. “The manual is in the phone.” His lips twitched into the benign smile you would give to a child when you showed him the miracle of turning shoelaces into a neat bow, one of those mysterious keys to unlock the world of grownup-hood.
I asked him if he saw any irony in a guy asking for a manual for a phone he didn’t know how to use and being told to use the phone to find the manual.
His smile wavered a bit. I think he was about to reach for his phone to look up “irony,” but I waved him off. “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll ask my granddaughter.”
Over the next hour or so, I sat at the kitchen table and played with my new phone. I tapped the screen and found out that it would be sunny today. And when I looked out the window, sure enough, the sun was shining. Amazing. Never again would I have to rely on all that labor-intensive window-looking to check out the weather.
I figured out how to get into my email, how to find my phone contacts, how to take a photo of the salt shaker, and even how to email the salt-shaker photo to anybody in my contact list. Amazing.
And I did all that without having to track down that manual the phone guy said was in there! I did it without interrupting my granddaughter’s Justin Bieber adoration services! I had figured out all that stuff on my own! Maybe I was smarter than I thought. Maybe if I ever got to the manual, a window would pop up that said, “See? You didn’t need a manual after all!”
Suddenly the doodad started to vibrate and jingle. I was so startled, I jostled the table and spilled the salt—not a good omen. Maybe the manual could tell me how to undo the voodoo.
By the time I remembered what the phone guy told me about how to answer the call, the phone stopped ringing. I couldn’t figure out how to track down who might have called me.
The icemaker in the fridge clunked some cubes into the freezer basket. I think that’s how it laughs.
I shot an angry glance at the coffee maker, but it was smart enough to keep its mouth shut.
• Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
