Technology's cold touch

Society has come a long way since rotary phones and Fischer Price record players.

Wife recently turned her flip-top cell phone into a floatation device during the great Melissa Compound flood of 2007 - it rained cats and dogs in our laundry room - leaving her without her favoritest (more than an opposable thumb) appendage - a cell phone. She can't breathe without it. It's her confidante, friend, and lover. In her pecking order of love, I'm sure it goes cell phone, dogs, cats, tempurpedic pillow, and then me. After mourning the loss of her friend - she programmed taps on another friend's cell phone and had it play repeatedly as she buried the drowned phone in the back yard, under it's favorite pine tree.

She really loved that phone.

Twenty minutes later she was on the run looking for a replacement appendage. It took two days for her to settle on just the right ear humper - another flip phone that she found after searching through every cell phone shop in the Valley, (on a side note - it was sold to her by an 18-year-old, spiky emo-black haired junior college reject with an open fly. I guess that's how the kids roll these days) - which worked about as well as her drowned phone, which is to say not at fuckin'-all. She cried all night, not for the newly dead phone, mind you, but because it meant she'd have to give in to the rest of you tech geeks and buy a Blackberry.

Now I don't know the different between a Blackberry, Strawberry, Blueberry or Dingleberry, but I do know when tech companies start naming their shit after fruits the rest of us consumer pigs are in for a world of hurt. It's like throwing letters into math, it just messes with one's head. Letters shouldn't be added and subtracted, and gadgets shouldn't be named after berries, or citrus, or apples for that matter. And don't get me started on power tools with carnivorous-animal names.

Then she showed me that her new lover has Internet access and to butter me up she set as her web favorites the following sites: Dodgers.com, Chargers.com, and ESPN. We could read and comment on our respective blogs. Fruit-named or not, the bells for this gadget were cooler than buying a TV with picture in picture capabilities, and almost as hot as TiVo ... almost. All that was missing was the ability to dry hump me in the passenger seat. When that phone is invented you'll find me camped out in line the week before it goes on sale.

I don't own a cell phone, never have, likely never will. As I see it, and the Sports Geek will back me up on this, I'm at three places on any given day: home, work, or the gym. If I'm at home, there's a real phone to call out and accept calls in on, and the same goes for work. If I'm at the gym, the last thing I want to do is talk to you people; no offense, but you don't want to hear me grunting and swearing and sweating as I hoist myself through 15 8-pound squats (anymore weight and I'm afraid I'll end up like a pinned monkey under a fallen pine tree). And I'm not the only one trapped in the cell communication void, I have a cousin in Cleveland who embraces the same ideals. In fact, every time we see each other the first question asked is whether one of us caved in to the phone fiend and bought a cell. We've avoided the siren ring tone this long, now it's a matter of principle.

Technology is a funny beast. I have no problem downloading hockey fights online or midget oil wrestling, but Wife hands me the cell phone and I'm like monkey being handed a football. What the hell am I supposed to do it with it? That must have been how the old folks in our office felt when our computer systems were upgraded. They're 45 and up, and them looking at the PCs made me think I wasn't in such bad shape. I hear it every day now, "This system sucks. Why did they (head boobs) go the cheap route?" (They didn't). Meanwhile, us folks under 35 be-bop our way through a day's work with our eyes closed and one hand free in case the urge hits us - if you know what I mean - because we have time now to do so (especially when JC Penney's release their bra and nightgown inserts for the weekend).

Maybe that's why it's so friggin' cold in our office these days, technology for office comfort is about as exact as a blind carpenter. I know it's summer, and its hotter and wetter than a witch's tit out in the Valley of the Sun, but really, Boobs, can we maybe notch the inside thermostat to mabye 74? Will that break the bank? We typically let the readers decide everything at the newspaper, from what features they'd like to see on what pages to what the optimal time is for me to take a crap, did they decided that dropping the temp to a nut-freezing 52 inside the building?

This is no joke. Yesterday, while working hard surfing the net for the best fart jokes and cartoon character porn (the Internet is a wonderful, research tool, isn't it?) my hands slowly turned blue and I eventually became disoriented from hypothermia because our office was colder than Montana in January. I was ready to take a handful of letters to the editor, pile them high in my trash can and torch them just so I could thaw out my frozen tootsies and shrunken pecker. I'd go to the restroom and wash my hands in hot water just to warm them up. That's not natural. It's late July, I shouldn't have to bundle like I'm Nanook of the North in winter hunting for plump penguins. But today I'm considering bringing a jacket with me. A jacket. In Phoenix. In July! There are two reasons to use a jacket out here: to wear during January because it actually dips below 65 then, and to cushion breakables as you pack them in a car on moving day. Otherwise, jackets are about as useful as a step stool is to a giraffe.

If we can have cell phones that tell us up-to-the-second Charger scores, and computer programs that allows anyone in the office to correct text in a story that doesn't require us - the copy editors - to click another button to update those changes, you'd think they can invent a thermostat that will keep a wide open office at a pleasant temperature. Wife's cell phone can show her videos, snap pics of boob-job billboards, wash the car and mix a mean tequila sunrise, so why can't the office air conditioning not freeze the snot to my cheek?

I guess that's what I get for working in Sun City, an old folks community that still thinks color TV is hot shit and a microwave oven is something to worship.