No Buttons

I finally caved.

After becoming the last holdout that I know (with the exception of my wife), I finally broke down and bought a "smart phone." It's only $25/month, so I convinced myself that I would be OK spending that for the convenience of staying in touch with work while traveling.

So I called "Bob" (who sounded vaguely like his name should have an "oo" appended to the end of it) to get the phone authorized the other night, and he told me that I needed to "dial ##8822#" to get activated. I looked down at the flat lump of plastic in my hand and calmly replied, "How do I do that? There are no buttons. Or numbers."

The rep acted a little stunned and walked me through how to get to a keypad on my new touchscreen phone. I have never felt so out of touch. I suddenly flashed back to images of my grandfather, madly mashing the buttons on his TV remote as though pressing them harder would make the TV work more to his liking.

In the end, I'm OK with it though. I don't mind that I'm a little bit out of sync. I never want my kids to remember staring at the top of my head while I played with my phone, so if that means that I'm always a couple of generations behind in gadget world, so be it.