I Need An App

A number of states that don't include mine are offering a free phone app to help you know how terrified you should be that you've been exposed to COVID-19. And if you have been, you can choose to take proper precautions such as isolating yourself or hiding in the closet sucking your thumb or beginning to take the precautions you hadn't bothered with before, or something. I'm not sure what I'd do with the information. I'd prefer something more immediate like a live warning system that you're about to get too close to an infected person. Something along the lines of that exploding dye packet that they put in the ransom money.

I mean, they used to do that in the olden days. They used to put big pustules or black boils on people, and if they could do that in medieval times, why can't they do it now? Now they have germy teenagers that look totally normal and although it's always a good idea to avoid those people anyway, it can't always be managed, especially if you want a pizza delivered.

I'm not terribly worried on a daily basis because I do take precautions. I assume that anyone I meet is riddled with disease. My favorites are the sneezy people who wave their hands in a friendly manner and holler that it's just a cold. Pardon me? If you have a cold, you have swapped snot with somebody in some way. You have. If you've been doing this pandemic right, you shouldn't have Sniffle One.

Because I can be exceptionally dense, I had to read several paragraphs about the app before I figured out how it works. As everyone who is not me knows, it works because it is assumed your phone is adhered to your body at all times. Apparently, that is a reasonable assumption. I'm the only person who says things like "Call me in the afternoon, I should be home by two," and I don't get how weird that sounds until I get the puzzled look.

As far as the Big Eye In The Sky is concerned, I have been sitting on my kitchen counter for days.

I also fail to remember that most people use their phones for way more than communicating with people. That's just about all I can do on mine. They say it's "smart," but that's just so as not to damage its self-esteem. Every time I try to download an app it tells me it's way too small to have such a big app shoved into it, and I should consider unloading something first, even though there's nothing in it. It's just a bulimic little piece of shit, is what it is. As a consequence I have learned to live without most of the life-simplifiers that litter our brainscape. I'll still walk a few miles to a store and find out it doesn't carry what I want and say Thanks Anyway and walk home again, and feel no sense of betrayal. Other people wave their phones in the air and get the nearest pizza paid for and dropped by drone through the sunroof while they're still driving. They check their blood pressure and then they check their portfolio and then probably their blood pressure again, and meanwhile I don't even check to see if anyone called once I get home, which is where my phone is, probably.

Nevertheless, the same people who are afraid Bill Gates wants to microchip them with a vaccine have a phone pocket sewn into their pajamas and don't think a thing of it. Everyone from the FBI to Walmart knows where they are. And I'm definitely not letting my phone go out and get sneezed on by all those other phones. I don't know where they've been.

But somebody does.

At The Low End Of The Ma Bell Curve

In the TV ad, people with diabetes are waving their phones at their arms and ziiip getting a glucose reading. Evidently you used to have to stab yourself to get the same result but now you just have a doo-dad on your arm that your phone talks to. Probably it also knows whether to notify your doctor, or a donut shop.

At least one of the reasons I'm glad I'm not diabetic is that you could tape my phone right to the doo-dad and leave it overnight and in the morning it would just fart and fall off .

Yes, it is supposedly a smart phone.

But you can line it up with all the other smart phones out there and it would be like the picture of your kid's first grade class, all spruced up in front of a banner that says MISS WHITTEN'S ALL-STARS. Psst: they're not all stars. One or two shine bright and some of them eat boogers. I don't ask much of my smart phone, and even so it does not live up to expectations.

I know there's nothing a good smart phone cannot do. I've driven friends around and mentioned a mild hankering and within a minute someone in the back seat has located a spot to hanker in, and summoned directions, and added a musical sound track, and anticipated my next hankering. By the time we arrive at our destination, the phone has wrapped up my taxes, contributed to the correct candidate, and found a suspicious mole.

I don't even think I get all my calls.

Here's a thing my phone does. Sometimes someone sends me a text message that is clearly a response to a gang of people but I can't see anything anyone else in the gang writes. I get snippets of conversation without the replies and have to guess what's going on and with whom. All I have is the uncomfortable feeling people are talking about me. I have, on these occasions, handed my phone to a competent young person to troubleshoot, and they always poke away at it for a minute and then hand it back with the diagnosis: "Huh."

Sometimes I no sooner pick up my phone than it informs me that it's too full and nothing is going to work properly until it disgorges itself of something. I don't know what. There are a few photos in there but no apps that didn't come standard. My phone might be bulimic.

I count on my phone for so little that it is easy for me to leave it behind when I go anywhere. Even at home it's not likely to be in the same room as me. I'm as prone to addiction as the next citizen and if I really could get useful or entertaining information out of my phone I'd probably be poking at it all day long. So I'm not inclined to upgrade. If I knew my phone could lock my front door while I was in another state, I'd be checking it every few seconds to see if my door was unlocked after all. That's not healthy.

Life is more enjoyable when you not only don't know everything, but you know you don't know everything, and you don't know how to find out. It's okay. It's probably the way it should be. Just me, Nature, and my phone back home on the counter, eating boogers.

PS: Happy Birthday Dave!