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Touchscreens Are a Gift from the Devil

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This probably runs on a touchscreen. I feel sorry for the poor sucker who has to program it.

 

I knew touchscreens were the worst idea ever the first time I saw one at the catalog pick-up department inside a Sears store. I’m not sure when that was, early 90s, maybe? Most technological advances come to our part of the country last. It looked like something out of a 1980s sci-fi movie. The kiosk was the size of an arcade video game. It was cumbersome and unresponsive. From that moment on, I knew the touchscreen thing would never catch on.

…..

…..

…..

Could I have been more wrong?

While I love all the cute things my cell phone can do besides, you know, make calls, I HATE that the magic of video calls or listening to the radio depends on a touchscreen. I try to scroll through Facebook, and it is constantly opening up stories I don’t want to read. “I did not click on that!” I shout, to no avail. I am trying to tag spam emails for deletion in my email, but instead the phone keeps opening the questionable messages, “I said DELETE!”

I am a lover of buttons. I loved my previous 2 phones that had slider keyboards. I was using them much later than anyone else. I could actually type a coherent text message. I could use proper spelling, capitalization, and punctuation if I wanted to!

I had to turn off my word predictor do-hickey on my current phone. I would be trying to type a “t” or “y” or “u” and I would instead end up with the word suggestion right above it. (I have tiny hands. My mom always says she was waiting for my hands to get bigger before she tasked me with doing the dishes. She is still waiting.) If me, of the tiny hands, has problems using a touchscreen keyboard, how do men do it? I know how my husband does it: he uses the voice command, which also gives out questionable results.

We have these fancy LED (or LCD?) screens with HD resolution that we can watch Hollywood movies on while we wait in line at the grocery store, but we are constantly putting our greasy fingerprints all over them. We are watching state of the art technology through a haze of gunk. Then we touch it to our face, putting something that is probably coated in fecal dust next to our mouths. Disgusting.

Touchscreen are EVIL. You can’t spell Devil without the evil.

I think we are too far gone now to beg for a return of the keyboard. That won’t stop  me though. Eventually we will just be able to think a thought and our phone will beam it for us. Unfortunately, my thoughts are about as clumsy as my fingers are. :-/
From the broken mind of Jennifer Friess, the joining of hearts & souls…
NOW AVAILABLE! Troll Gurl and the Cursed Kingdom

Smart Phones? Should Call’ em Anxiety Phones

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Smart phones are like the absolute worst thing for people suffering from abnormally high levels of anxiety.

Landline phones were immune from such worries. When your phone connected to the wall by a cord, your only concern was whether someone would pick up on the other end and if you actually wanted them to.

That was a ROTARY phone I was talking on. Just try to explain THAT to your children nowadays...

That was a ROTARY phone I was talking on. Just try to explain THAT to your children nowadays…

Then came cordless phones. You could take the receiver into the bathroom with you. But that introduced the phenomenon of dying or dead batteries and the hassle of recharging.

People were not satisfied with only talking cordlessly within their own home. Oh, no. They needed to be able to talk that way EVERYWHERE.

My first cell phone was a Tracfone prepaid. I had to remember to buy a card for my minutes. I had to remember to charge it. I had to remember to put in the ROAMING CODE. I had to remember that I had it, because, well, I really didn’t use it that often. I had to worry about misplacing my phone and losing my charging cord.

As phones got wiser, then I was always running out of text messages (I used to purchase them in 200 message blocks-ha).

Then phones got smart. Except I am always a few steps behind the current technology. I not only have to worry now about keeping the battery charged, I have to worry having software up-to-date enough to access Cozi, Facebook, and my email. I have to manage my high speed internet usage lest I get decelerated. I have to fret about whether ABC will air the season finales I must see before my free Hulu trial expires. I have to consider whether I am on Wifi or 4G LTE depending on what tasks I want to perform.

And buying a new phone! You have to get your screen anti-scratch coated, a new snazzy case, transferring apps from one phone to another, finding a micro-SD card with always more gigs and one that is not corrupted.

My husband and I both have killed phones by subjecting them to too much moisture. But I may have thwarted that issue this time. My phone is reasonably water-resistant & it has a water-resistant case on it. Water-resistant X 2 = Waterproof, right???

Sometimes I am more concerned about if my phone has an adequate charge than if my son has had dinner yet. And don’t get me started on if my GPS setting has changed itself to battery-draining “high accuracy” again on its own without my permission.

But there is always the young boy. I worry he will drop it, change my wallpaper, erase my apps (all things, by the way, he has done in the past). Or worse, he might put it into one of his flour-heavy “experiments.” Just as long as the experiment doesn’t involve “will it float in the toilet”, I guess worse things could happen to it…

..Like blowing away in a tornado, falling into a live volcano, being eaten by a flying shark. Ahhhhh! It is just too much to bear. Maybe I should go back to a cord in the wall. Then I wouldn’t have to feel like I needed to look at my phone all the time to check for missed calls or text messages.

But I won’t do that.

Ill Communication-Official

Even though sometimes cell phones frustrate me to no end and make me just want to smash it (my husband has done that, by the way), I won’t give it up. Because they are just so fun to play with and waste time. And the only game I have on mine is alienSwarm, a sort of imitation Galaga.

Follow the romantic entanglements of The Riley Sisters in my books:
Be Careful What You Wish ForAVAILABLE NOW!
When You Least Expect It THE CONTINUING ROMANCE!
The Wind Could Blow a BugWHERE IT ALL BEGAN!

What I Learned This Week – 9/1/13

This week I learned that cell phones don’t last forever.

I was at the grocery store. M happened to be looking especially cute, so I tried to take a picture of him. And my cell phone screen went black.

And it never recovered.

My Samsung Restore served me well for 2 1/2 years.

I had already picked out my new cell phone. Which seems to be the pattern in my life that quickly leads to my old phone dying.

I am now the proud owner of a Kyocera Rise. I love my sliders. And it has a touchscreen, so it will be like my training wheels for the day when the industry no longer makes slider style phones. And now I can have APPS!

The learning curve was steep. The first night I had trouble sleeping because I had so much anxiety over trying to work my new phone.

It's an "Anxie-TEE"--Get it?  I KILL me!

It’s an “Anxie-TEE”–Get it? I KILL me!

Surprisingly, I am adapting to the touchscreen quite well. I was freaking out that I had no enter key. (Until I found it, that is…)

Now my biggest hurdle is probably trying to figure out how to maximize my battery life. I used to charge my previous phone once every 2-3 days. This phone needs a charge about every 24hrs. Oy! I guess that is the price that comes with more functions.

My new celly

My new celly

I also learned we have too darn many charging cords in our house (and some with removable USB cords as well):

1. The digital camera
2. My old cell phone
3. My new cell phone
4. Husband’s cell old phone
5. Husband’s cell new phone
6. Husband’s indoor model helicopter
7. My laptop
8. Husband’s laptop

This is mildly driving me crazy. And you might say that we no longer need the cords to our old phones. But, they all have the same input. In a pinch, we could use those on our new phones as well.

So, I took all but a few of my husband’s cords and labeled them with permanent marker and electrical tape so that I will know which cord was intended for each device. Oh, how I love electrical tape.

Hopefully, this will bring a little organization into a tech-obsessed world.

What I Learned This Week – 9/23/12

This week I learned that I shouldn’t order from Forever21.com. I tried to order a dress and a scarf I was intending to incorporate into my Halloween costume this year. (Sorry–Top Secret. You will have to come back on Halloween to find out what I am going to dress as.) I ordered my items on Friday, September 14th. Now, I realize that is a Friday. But by Thursday, September 20th, I had received no shipping email and my order status still said “NEW” when I looked it up on their website. So, I sent an email to customer service. As of today, Sunday,September 23rd, I have received absolutely no reply and my order status still says “NEW”. I have looked it up so many times now that I have the order number memorized.

I guess maybe they realized I am not 21. Nor a size O. At this point, I really don’t care if I get my order. I can make my costume from odds and ends around the house I already own. The dress was quite cute and I would probably be able to wear it for other occasions as well. But I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t come. I just wish they would tell me that, sooner, rather than later. And I will be really pissed if they only ship me the scarf! It was a add on purchase. I don’t want to pay $6.95 in shipping just for a scarf I could buy at Walmart.

There is a phone number on their website, so I guess next week I will call that and probably talk to some nice folks in India.

[UPDATE: I did call customer service (weeks ago), and the chick told me she would tell the warehouse to ship my order immediately and would refund my shipping charge once my order shipped. A few days later I received a generic email response that said I would be notified when my order shipped.

As of 10/8/12, I have received no notice that my order has shipped and my order still shows a status of “NEW” on the website. I guess I won’t have an awesome Halloween costume afterall:( My sympathies to all the other customers who are in the same situation.]

[FURTHER UPDATE: I finally received a shipping notice on 10/19, and my order arrived by 2nd day air (which I did not select) on October 22. Only took 38 days to receive. And my accessory went Out of Stock in that time.]

This week I also learned how to put songs on my cell phone! Now, I got this cell phone in the spring of 2011. While the phone has a SD card slot, I had no way to connect the phone to my old desktop computer. I tried a USB cord. That didn’t work for pictures, so I didn’t even think about trying to use it for music. And my iTunes was screwed up on that puter anyway.

I got a laptop for Christmas of 2011. I was ecstatic that it had an SD drive built-in. That meant to get photos off my phone, I no longer had to email them to myself, one by one by one by one by… I could just now slap in the SD card into my puter and go to town with downloading and organizing. And I still didn’t give a thought to music and my celly. (I notice I am lapsing into my own brand of slang. Swarry.)

Then my asbestos friend said how much she would love to put her music on her phone. That got me thinking. Friday I bought Pink’s new album off Amazon.com for $5. Now, this is a big step for me. I bought it not knowing if I could make it go into my iTunes account or not. After a few tries, I did. Then I was like “Let’s try to put it on my cell phone!” And it worked! Very easily! So I threw some more songs onto my cell phone SD card. …And I ran into the inevitable problem–not all of my files were mp3, which is all that my phone would recognize and play. But after a brief tussle with iTunes, I managed to convert most of the songs I wanted into mp3 and shove them onto my celly. (There were just a few that were über ultra super protected that it would not let me. Although technically I know a way to get around that too, if I wanted.)

And as I happily listened to my songs on my cell phone last night, I realized how much happier I am with daily music in my life:)

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