One More Thing…
I'm All Thumbs
When I was a much younger man, I did like a lot of the young folks and tried to impress other people with the things I bought. I got a new car, and the hefty monthly payments that came with it. My sneakers always had a Nike swoosh and I made sure to carry my Sony Walkman in plain sight. And yet I wasn't nearly as obsessed with status symbols as some of my friends, with their home cappuccino makers and $5,000 stereos.
As I've gotten older, I've made an effort to avoid acquiring status symbols. This is partly because, by definition, they are expensive, but also because I don't want to appear to be trying to impress people. I drive a 19-year-old car, I wear clothes from Target and my watch is a $15 Timex. And now the Walkman makes me look like a dweeb. In fact, you might say that I'm to the point where I try to impress people with how unimpressive my stuff is (which is probably just as bad as the opposite).
But recently I broke down and got what is probably nowadays the ultimate status symbol: a BlackBerry. Yes, BlackBerries have been around for awhile, but the cellular service in Dayton was only upgraded to allow their use a couple of months ago. So here in Mayberry, I'm cutting edge.
For those of you who can only dream about reaching the level of coolness I've attained, a BlackBerry combines several of life's basic necessities into one neat little package the size of a smashed pack of cigarettes. It's a cell phone. It's a camera. It's a PDA (that stands for Personal Digital Assistant, which contains an address book, a calendar, a calculator and lots of other little gadgets to waste time with). But, most importantly, my BlackBerry sends and receives emails and allows me to surf the internet anywhere.
The secret to the BlackBerry's success is its tiny keyboard. It's laid out just like a regular computer keyboard, but it's only a bit more than two inches wide. Each key is less than a quarter-inch wide. So you can use it while you're sitting at a restaurant waiting for your roast duck, or while you're riding the elevator up to your penthouse suite. You just tap away with your thumbs and send emails to all your friends telling them how lucky they are to have you in their lives. At the bottom of each message, after you sign your name, is a little statement telling the recipient that it was sent from your BlackBerry.
This is all great – and I love every minute of it – but my problem is that typing on this thing is like trying to type on a Barbie typewriter. I'm not a huge person, but I'm not tiny either and I've never been overly coordinated. The same goes for my thumbs. So for me, typing even a short sentence takes intense concentration. I hold the keyboard about three inches from my face, scrunch up my eyes and squint into the screen, tapping away slowly with my giant thumbs, hitting the wrong key about every third tap. I've got the backspace key down cold. They say that some people BlackBerry while they're driving, but I can't imagine how. My house could be burning around me and I wouldn't know it if I were typing on the BlackBerry.
So guess what happens when somebody dials my cell phone number while I'm in the middle of trying to type an email. Not only does the BlackBerry ring, but the caller ID flashes on the screen simultaneously. Let's just say that once my heart starts up again and I find where the little sucker landed, the words that come out of my mouth are completely unprintable. At least I have the good sense not to answer the call. I have too few friends as it is.