I have spent the last several weeks dipping my technological toe rather tentatively into the 21st century, as the proud yet bewildered possessor of a Blackberry. This phone came to me via a former student/ now friend of mine named Nic Sluss- Rodionov, who had upgraded his own phone to something straight out of Battlestar Galactica – and thus had no need for his old Blackberry, which he graciously passed on to me with the expectation that I would fall in love with it and come to deeply appreciate all it had to offer. Nic actually gave me his old Blackberry a couple of months ago, but with Magic Flute absorbing all of my energy and attention, there was no way I could take on the challenge of learning a fancy new phone. So the Blackberry spent about eight weeks on my nightstand, gathering dust and in acute danger of becoming the world’s fanciest coaster. Then one morning about three weeks ago, I woke up to find my current phone emblazoned with a strange “Now Downloading” icon that I’d never seen before- but in every other way, the phone was completely dead and useless. (I might as well have been holding a brick in my hand.) A quick trip to our local Verizon store yielded this lingo-laden assessment: “Yup, it’s fried.” And suddenly, that fancy coaster sitting on my nightstand became my phone.
And it’s been an interesting several weeks with my Blackberry, although I have to say that it hasn’t been interesting in entirely positive ways. First of all, it has been a potent reminder that when it comes to new gadgets and figuring out how to use them, my aptitude ranks somewhere between the sea urchin and the garden slug. Part of it is that some people love to just fiddle with something and figure it out bit by bit. I hate that. I always have. I would much rather be spoon-fed everything I need to know. . . preferably by someone with the patience of a saint. . . or at least be given an easy-to-use owner’s manual. I had no owner’s manual in this case, and between Kathy and Nic I was tutored in the most basic functions of the phone- the stone knives/ bearskins facets of its operation. But what I really needed to do- and simply didn’t do – was sit down with this amazing little machine and get to know it. And I simply didn’t / couldn’t bring myself to do that. So I would look at a screen full of icons and have no idea what most of them were for or how to access them. And on one or two instances of temporary insanity when I would actually click on something to see what would happen, I would find myself mystified like one of those prehistoric men confronting the strange-looking obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey – and feeling this sudden urge to bash my Blackberry into submission with the nearest available club.
And then there’s all the Butt-Dialing. I have no idea how many times I inadvertently called various people in my phone directory as the phone rattled around in my pocket . . . plus all the times when I would take my phone out of my pocket to see 66666666666666677777777
77777888888888888888888888 on the screen, ready to be dialed as soon as I pressed the little green button (one of the only buttons on the phone I could readily comprehend and use.) More seriously, the phone- at least as it was set up- wouldn’t alert me to the presence of voice mail or text messages like my own phone had- meaning that I might go three days without realizing that Peter Gelb from the Metropolitan Opera had called, imploring me to fly to New York and take over the title role in their new production of “Hamlet.” Actually, it’s not that the phone didn’t alert me to new messages, but it does so with a gentle little icon up at the top of the screen that was all too easy to miss or ignore. And even in the text messaging, with which on my old phone I had grown fairly adept, this new phone presented new challenges like how to use punctuation. (I’m one of those fossils who texts in complete sentences and complete words, with proper punctuation.) I suddenly found myself unable to place so much as a period in my texts. There’s obviously a way- but I just didn’t have the will to figure out the way.
So it proved not to be the match made in heaven that Nic had predicted (or maybe I should say “hoped”) it would be – and Kathy quickly figured out that paying for the service plan needed to sustain a Blackberry that’s being used in such limited fashion is roughly akin to paying to heat a big house when you’re only using the porch. So today, my wife – with my blessing – went to Verizon to secure for me the newest generation of my old phone. But for as long as Nic will let me keep it, I will hold on to the Blackberry in the hope that someday I will find the time and energy to properly explore it and learn how to make the most of it. For now, it’s back on my nightstand, a reminder of how clueless I am- a caveman in a Captain Kirk world.