Smart Aleck Phones

If ever a phone were too big for its britches -- let alone for my Perry Ellis heather gray flat front trousers with elastic waistband -- it's this pathologically ambitious "smart phone" of mine, which can apparently do everything except wash dishes -- and I'm sure there's an app on the way for that task too before long. Not only is its voracious appetite for voltage decidedly going against the generally green grain of 21st-century America (whoops, there goes another West Virginia mountaintop to coal mining), but its endless profusion of bells, whistles and downright calliopes actually get in the way of me executing the two tasks for which I bought the phone in the first place: making and receiving phone calls. This drab, heavy, and awkwardly sized monolith (an esthetic step backwards in phone design which makes the old rotary honkers look like streamlined works of art) is so hopped up with irrelevant applications with hair-trigger icons that it takes little more than a sneeze to send it into "airline mode" (whatever that is) and/or to inadvertently activate the speakers or mute them altogether.



Meanwhile its dialing shortcuts are so ruthlessly efficient that you can occasionally cause it to dial merely by thinking subconsciously of someone on your phone list. (At least once every two months, I will be absentmindedly gazing at my irritating little monolith, assuming that it's more or less in sleeping mode, only to notice to my horror that it is actually dialing my brother-in-law in Germantown, apparently of its own accord!) And not a month goes by without Our Lady of the Smart Phone perkily prompting me to say a voice command, never mind the fact that I never knowingly ask her for that privilege and wouldn't know how to consciously do so even if I wanted to. Nor does she ever respond to my subsequent remonstrances to "shut the hell up!" which, however, she MUST be hearing them, since I virtually scream them at her right into the microphone -- or at least into what I imagine to be the microphone, so thoroughly has that feature been hidden by the precedent scorning designers of this phone -- or rather of this miniaturized home computer which just happens to have a phone application included on it.



Where are all the 70-year-old grandmothers (and their grandstanding grandsons from Seattle) who are trying to shut down Wall Street even as I write? If greed is really the bugaboo that they're out to chastise, why aren't they descending on Mountainview at this moment like so many left-leaning locusts, blasting the Google suits for turning the simple telephone into the buying gadget par excellence? I mean, think about it: In whose interest has the telephone been thus transmogrified, almost literally overnight?



In the interest of penny-pinchers? No.

In the interest of environmentalists? No.

In the interest of privacy advocates? No.

In the interest of the "hang up and drive" crowd? Certainly not.



Oh, hey, wait a minute! You don't suppose that Google and Verizon and Motorola (etc.) are actually creating these phones in the hopes of selling us more goods and services, meanwhile thanking us for that privilege by monitoring our buying activity (not to mention our taste in books, movies and music) for hints on how they can sell to us ever more effectively in the future, do you?



"Maybe so," says Grandma, "but I'm afraid that I'd really look my age on the 6:00 news if I were to picket the Googleplex in sunny California on behalf of what's sure to be construed by the media as merely Luddite principles. Better to go after the politically correct enemy du jour: you know, the only guys who are still unabashedly making money hand over fist these days. (No, not NBA stars, folks, Wall Street bankers, of course! Wall Street bankers!)"