Not wanting to be a dinosaur, I decided to become part of the information age and purchase the new iPhone 4S. I waited until Black Friday to get special deals online, but I went a bit overboard and am now the owner of an iPad 2, a leather satchel to carry it in, and a wallet-sized pouch for my iPhone which can also hold credit cards. John, the manager of the Verizon 4G Wireless store on Pearl Street, who had ordered the phone for me, offered to set me up and give me lessons.
The first thing I learned is that whatever he taught me one day, I forgot by the next. In other words, I must continuously use the knowledge or it leaves my brain without a trace. The reason is that I don’t have a proper storage place in said brain—this new information does not relate to anything already there, so it needs brand new synapses to go from short-term to long-term memory.
My friend Vance came over the next day and taught me how to cradle the phone and use my two thumbs to type on the almost impossible and much-too-small keyboard. Luckily for me, the keyboard is a mind reader, when I make a typing mistake it knows what I meant to write and corrects it automatically.
The two-year-old daughter of a friend of mine, when given a book, started sliding her fingers across the cover and announced “broken” because no new image appeared. Is this whom I am competing with?
I am adding new words to my vocabulary daily. Today it is “synch,” the past tense of which is not “sunk” like for a doomed ship, but “synched” as in “synchronized”). I have now synched my contact list and my e-mails from my computer to both my iPad and iPhone. They are all actually compatible and do everything together.
I have also made a phone call and received one (with some trepidation). I have even talked to Siri (the computer voice built into the new iPhone 4S). She asked: “How can I help you?” I had no idea except to wish I were younger than my current age of eighty-five. Siri will also answer any question I would have formerly looked up in a dictionary or encyclopedia at the touch of a button.
I am looking forward to being able to download all my medical records to my iPhone and have them available to any doctor, whether in La Jolla or Timbuktu. Weather forecasts, traffic reports, and the latest news are now all at my fingertips.
As I sit here and write long hand in my recliner, both my new gadgets are hooked up and getting charged. I know they needed it because of the little lines at the right top of my phone that weren’t as many as they should be. But my life is about to greatly improve. To my now-synched calendar I have added an alarm that will ring fifteen minutes before any meeting and wake me up if I’m napping. I will never again have an excuse for being late or just not showing up.
Although my life has become significantly more complicated and I am consuming an inordinate amount of time on this learning curve, I am confident that if I ever become competent—which at this moment does not seem probable—I will be the better and more efficient person for it, addicted to these new little companions who will always be able to tell me where I am located, where I should go next, and how to get there.
I am looking forward to reading a book online while waiting at some checkout counter, or answering my e-mail or watching a movie while in the waiting room of some doctor’s office. But be careful, dear readers, you will soon be in deeper trouble, for next, I am going to learn how to tweet all of you.
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