Technophilia

This week marks the final leg of my Fall marathon for work. As of Sunday at 6 am I return to my regular oncall rotation of one week on and four off. Also, things should generally slow down. Of course, the timing was awful since I missed Skareeoke, and apparently it was quite a spectacle. I actually got to College and Mass before my pager blew up and I had to head back home. Bummer.

All this work had me feeling a little blue, and after my weekend of hockey and overnight data center upgrades I decided to treat myself. Well, honestly, gravity scored an assist. I've had a standard clamshell cell phone with, shall I say, minimal functionality. It performed all the necessary functions of a cell phone: dial in, accept calls, text, voice mail, caller id. It even had a camera, but there was no way to get the pictures off the camera without paying for a picture text and my inner miser couldn't handle that. This phone has also withstood some heavy beatings, lots of drops, and general misuse. I actually had it long enough to necessitate replacing the battery as it could no longer hold enough charge to facilitate a fifteen minute phone call. I'm used to it. It's familiar.

Witness exhibit A to the right here. Saturday, in between hockey games some teammates and I went to lunch at the Ram. When I got up to leave I hastily put on my jacket. Out popped my cell phone and as it tumbled out of my pocket it flipped open. In this open position it slammed into a wooden chair and that was all she wrote for this little number. Or was it? I was in quite a bit of denial after it broke cleanly snapped in two, the flexible data board sheared off at both ends. I took it to a mall kiosk and asked if they could repair it. No such luck. I asked if they could retrieve the numbers off of it. My kind but useless sales associate decked out in blue face paint didn't even try to hook it up. He did try to sell me a new phone though, but if I wanted a new phone I'd have to sign up for 2 years of service. Otherwise the cheapest phone was 200 dollars. Yikes!

I found that I could use the phone with it attached to a headset with mic boom. I spent the next couple days walking around with a wire in my phone holding "stumpy" and dialing out to people who had numbers I remembered. And then I got the hook up.

Romeo helped me out with some discount action on a brand new iPhone. Quite a leap from stumpy clamshell. The interface is excellent although it's taken a little work to get familiar with the touch screen. I've experienced one glitch in operating it so far, but I'll spare you the details. The moral of that side story is that I couldn't be bothered to get upset with the error. In fact this product is so cool I found myself being quite patient in wanting to figure out what the matter was. Anyone who has ever seen me in front of a fussy electronic device has been treated to a colorful spew of expletives. I've spent the last couple days consoling my over worked self with the colorful glow illuminating the crystal clear images on this incredible toy.

Major toy purchases always make me a little elated and edgy followed by some sort of techno-purchase afterglow crash. When I first heard of technology addiction I dismissed the notion as absurd alarmism from a group of sanctimonious busy bodies. What's wrong with being connected at all times? What's wrong with having a device that makes that experience better? What's wrong with pursuing better? Of course, it's that pursuit of better and a search for the external that rests at the core of addiction. I've read that a person is considered to have a technology problem if one spends more time with the technology than with people. I find that to be a facile explanation. People drive technology. We haven't figured out a way to create self-replicating data boards yet. So at the end of every interaction with a piece of technology there is a person who created it.

To me a problem exists when an individual has trouble connecting with oneself, and that is hard for an external observer to quantify. I'd like to sit with a corporate psychologist and ask her how that makes her feel.

I'm going to let that be the end of my rambling. I think working all these hours is making me a tidge punchy.