Me, the technological late bloomer

If you’re an astute reader, you may have noticed that some books now come with a “trigger warning” printed on one of the forward-most pages. A trigger warning declares that all or part of the story that follows may possess elements some readers might be sensitive to or find disturbing (ie: violence, mental conditions, domestic abuse, etc…). It’s the print version of the film industry’s MPAA rating.

I’m installing a trigger warning into this edition’s Happy Trails for those easily excited or have heart conditions because what I’m about to disclose is shocking.

Brace yourself:

I bought a smartphone.

Everyone still with me?

Good.

Just take a few deep breaths and let that sink in. I know how you feel. I’ve been walking around with an Android in my pocket for about a month now, and I’m still processing…processing…processing like a computer failing to “compute” a command.

If you’re an avid reader of Happy Trails, you know my aversion to cellphones and how intense it is (they’re the devil’s handiwork, I tell you!), so you may wonder what motivated me to make the leap into modern technology, which I’ve been painstakingly avoiding for…ever.

Two things.

Money.

Humility.

Those two things rarely go together so let’s pay attention.

I’m pretty stingy with my minutes (yes, I had a plan that had minutes), so I can always trust myself to keep well within my talk usage. Every month for the past five years, my bill has been the same until I received my November bill of last year. It was suddenly $100 higher than normal.

I called my provider, absolutely certain the error was on their end or that my phone, as aged and decrepit as it was, had been hacked. I’m not famous and I’m not a young woman and I’m certainly not taking suggestive “selfies” with my phone, so who’d hack my phone I have no idea. I was confident, though, I was not the culprit to the spike in my bill.

After a few minutes on the phone with the representative, it turned out I was.

I prattled one month and paid the consequences. See what happens when men open their mouths too much? Ladies, this is why we don’t talk. It costs us money. Someway, somewhere, somehow, we pay.

The representative then politely informed me that because I had gotten so far behind the times in phone technology, there were other plans with unlimited talk/text (and varying levels of data usage) that I could get for less money than I was paying. Apparently we pay if we don’t talk to. The only catch was I had to upgrade to a smartphone. I almost hung up. Talk about a trigger warning.

In the end, monetary sensibilities won out, and I found myself outfitted with an Android.

I convinced myself to make the switch, too, because when you’re 37 and people twice your age are telling you to “get with the times,” you have to start to wonder if your principles are becoming problematic.

You see the irony in a 74 year old telling a 37 year old he needs to upgrade to a smartphone, right?

And I’m glad I did because among the many amazing things a smartphone can do, it can also bring you back from another dimension.

For all its charm during the holidays, the Woodstock Square is tricky to navigate. But it shouldn’t be. The traffic flows only one way and you can only make four turns max before arriving exactly where you started but somewhere between turn one and four, it’s incredibly easy to become disoriented, making where you entered impossible to find. You go in one entrance, and when you come out, you’re not only not in Woodstock, you’re in an entirely new dimension.

This happened to my wife and I a few days before Christmas, when we headed into the square for some shopping. We entered, parked, shopped, and when he left, I had no idea where I was and ended up driving about twenty minutes into pitch-black farm country. I wasn’t lost (men never get lost!), but I didn’t want to turn around either, so I pulled over and consulted the map app on my phone. It located me pronto, I paired it with my home address, and told it (literally told it with my voice) to get me home.

And it did. Believe it or not, this was the first time I used a GPS app or system of any sort, and when it got me home, I said, “Alright, Android! Nice job. High-five! Wait, not high-five. You have a supersensitive touchscreen, and I wouldn’t accidentally want to call my mother-in-law.” The phone agreed that would not be a good idea then congratulated me for listening to its instructions.

What I came to realize with my smartphone was that like traversing the Woodstock Square, it, too, opened the door to whole new dimension: The Twenty-First Century of all places.

I’m glad to finally be here!

Better late than never.

---