Dead phone but not dead author

I have other tales to tell but I will focus on the following:

1) I have not been sick since Thursday. While I still have the occasional cough to get the leftover mucus out of my lungs, I have been working since Wednesday and back in the office since Thursday.

Therefore I hope everyone will stop thinking I am at death's door. I realize some good people died last week. I was never even close to that level of illness and I apologize if I conveyed such a possibility. I had no open sores, no vomiting, no lost limbs, no hospital visit. Thank you for the well wishes.

2) I have a new cell phone, thus I have joined the cadre of douchebags smart phone owners.

I've hated my phone for a long time, but it was tolerable. I was hoping to get to the four-year mark with it, but I was a month shy. On Saturday I had charged it in the car, unplugged it to get food and was on a call to a close friend when it powered itself off about fifteen minutes into the call.

As I drove home, I came to the conclusion that I was ready for the future.

When I was a kid, I only imagined a future that went out to 2000. After that, I assumed there would've been a nuclear war and the few humans left would be frightening nomads adorning their hair with old video tape. Being politically conscious at the age of 7 and that year being 1982 (Reagan, Thatcher, Brezhnev, Andropov...) was not such a blessing.

Most futurist concepts went about ten or fifteen years out, and even then the goals were skewed. We hear nothing about artificial hearts anymore. The Space Shuttle is becoming less and less a part of our lives, not something we use as normal people to visit space stations (oh, and they still have to be made by hand -- the shuttles and the station).

I had not conceived of having access to all the maps I needed, all the bickering and information I could ever want, all the old TV shows and a phone as I walked down the street. Did anyone in their thirties now imagine all of this during primary school? I think "smaller VCR" was a big goal. The idea that phone calls cost basically nothing was not even on the deck. let alone a world where no one is really alone.

The next morning I had charged the phone completely, unplugged it, got a call from fangirl715 and spoke with her for ten minutes. Then it was down from three bars to one. That's it -- if it can't do phone calls because the battery has lost its memory retention, then it's over.

I called my company's customer service and asked about options. Then I ran down to the store in Packard's Corner (that's where Comm Ave meets Brighton Ave in Allston) and gave up on dumb phones rather quickly. You can either get a crappy phone that has fewer features than my ancient phone or get something that is faster than the PC I was using when I first made LJ entries and put it in my watch pocket.

For a difference of about twenty bucks a month, I now have something wicked cool. It's got a slide-out keyboard, a touch screen, a micro-USB port (meaning I can charge the phone and my MP3 player from the same wall plug at the same time), good sound, great reception, a bar code scanner, the Internet, wifi when I don't have cell reception, and all the Android I could want.

I'm still getting used to it. I needed help locking the screen so I wouldn't ass-call someone (even though the phone is in my front pocket and the touch tone buttons are virtual). I felt like Instant Old Man until I learned that tapping the off key instead of holding the off key did what I wanted.

Then I saw an icon that looked... ummm... like a loaf of bread dropped into a pan. I saw this in the upper left corner and tried to click on it. It wouldn't budge. It didn't have an obvious brand on it. The battery icon was similar but colorful and fully charged. I had no new phone calls, voice messages, texts, twits twats tweets, emails or crashes. What the heck was it? How do I look up "loaf of bread with slight dent in pan" as help problem.

Then I dragged a little more smartly on the top banner and see a message peer out. I dragged even more and it offered me a martini -- oh wait, wrong drag bar. Bummer -- no martini.

I finally got my alert: there was a software upgrade downloaded (a fat arrow onto the phone, not a loaf of bread dropped into a pan) and ready to be installed.

It's time to come up with new ideas for the future. We have toys better than Tricorders. What should we do next?

This is the future. I could like it.