I’m not quite sure how the St. Louis Magazine editors were able to find me in the “Undisclosed Location” I timeshare with Dick Cheney. But when they offered me the Wednesday blog position, I was honored—and confided that out of all the days I do absolutely nothing, Wednesdays are the days I do least of the absolutely nothing I usually do.
So, I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to commune with you via a magazine I like a whole heckuva lot. In fact, it and Jane’s Defence Industry News are the only magazines we allow to breach the security of the Undisclosed Location Condos.
But in the interest of that “full disclosure” stuff, I need to declare to you right off the bat that I am a card-carrying, born again Luddite of the first order. I don’t do anything cyber and fewer things electronic. No Smart phone for me. My phone is one of the early Dumb phones. It performs the primitive functions of accepting calls sometimes and allowing me to dial numbers…if I am not in a “drop-out zone.” I decided I would eschew ultra-slick electronics when I saw a guy in Straub’s actually transmitting pictures of the bananas back to his wife, so she could determine if they were too ripe for this hard-of-thinking person to bring home. I promised myself that I would never join the ranks of tapioca-brained folks like that guy.
My first attempt to text many years ago was disastrous: I sent some rather salacious thoughts to a ladyfriend of mine, only to find out to my horror that she had switched phones and numbers with her teenage daughter! When the return text thundered back: “WHO IS THIS???” I swore then and there I would never text again. I haven’t.
I don’t Tweet. I shall maintain that real men don’t Tweet. We roar. We growl. We rumble. But we don’t Tweet. Reminds me of the nurse asking me during a hospital stay if I had “tinkled” yet. I advised her that the sound of that function a guy my size would produce involved the words “elephant” and “flat rock.”
I’ve never owned an iPhone, youPhone, or a wePhone. Whenever anyone asks me to get Linked in with them, I give them at least 10 quick reasons I want to remain Linked out. I’m not on Facebook, because I’ve not gotten married lately and don’t have a cute cat or drooling dog or a new baby that looks—as they all do—like Winston Churchill. I don’t have the latest mushy details on a cute girlfriend or a drooling boyfriend, and I have no new travel pictures of me blocking out the Eiffel Tower and the sun. Tell me this: Haven’t intelligent people gotten the idea by now of just how many times and ways Facebooking, Twittering, texting, Linking, and “friending” people in general can screw up your life, your job, or your relationship? I’m talking about the high-level government officials who are now divorced, destroyed, jailed, or all three because of something they tweeted, texted, or had to “Face” up to in their “book.” I’m also talking about the text message you accidentally sent to the wrong person and couldn’t snatch back.
Speaking of snatching… I’d like to snatch the phones from the two people strolling down the street together—perhaps holding hands—each with “communications blockers” pressed against their ear. Over there, look at the six kids at the cafeteria table. Five of them are on cell phones chattering away with someone not at the table. Pitiful. Will a guy or a gal ever be able to get close enough to look directly into each other’s eyes and ask for a date? I fear the day will come when all marriage proposals will be done with the proposer on bended knee with a phone in one hand, asking for the standing proposee’s hand in marriage. The other hand—the one not glued to the phone!
I seriously envision the day will come soon when a job applicant will enter the interviewer’s office; they nod in greeting; then both get on their cell phones to talk to each other across a desk. Wait for it.
I’ve started putting my foot down on invasive hand-held thingies in social settings. If I am going to pay for an expensive meal, I’m going to demand uninterrupted attention. “Here, my dear, is my handy-dandy lead-lined box. Please put your hand-held interrupter inside the box, and I will put the lid tightly on until I get you back home.” The only exception I’ll make is if my dinner partner is expecting a possible call from a loved one who has a high likelihood, at some point during our dinner, of getting trapped in a silver mine collapse in the Gobi desert. In the earliest days of these "antisocial" media devices, being able to get a phone call in a restaurant or a vibration in church was trendy and called attention to how cool you were. Today, it still is what it was: rude!
And don’t get me started about how gadget-fondling has virtually destroyed literacy and our beleaguered language. Young kids who started deforming their thumbs, jellifying their brains, and dropping further and further from literacy five years ago are steadily stumbling into an adulthood where spelling, good grammar, face-to-face conversation, and universally understood writing are way out of their reach. If you’re hoping for better results any time soon, BFF: U R SOL. I will never LMAO about how bad the situation is. And you should never LOL either.
If you want to go on a diet in the near future, why not go on a diet to eliminate “fatty antisocial media messages that have zero nutritional value"? If you get 20 calls or texts today—ask yourself how many of them were absolutely, positively essential, and how many were remarkably unnecessary. How many minutes of your life will you waste today?
Talk it over. See you next Wednesday.
