Curmudgeon gets a smart phone, proves how dumb he is

It's official. I now have an appliance that's smarter than me.

There is, of course, an argument to be made that most of my appliances, and some of the furniture besides, were already smarter than me. I try to ignore that sort of thing.

The first proof that smart phones are smarter than we are came in the way we were manipulated into getting them.

Youngest Son, it seems, was missing important text messages. Even on my old dumb phone, I could set up a message to be sent to multiple people. And when I pressed 'send' they all got the message. But a smart phone -- being smart, and also wanting to place its relatives -- sends messages to multiple recipients that can't be opened up on the dumb phone. Youngest Son would get notification that he had a message, but the contents thereof would remain tantalizingly beyond his reach.

What's that you say? He could have seen that Coach Smith sent a message, which he could not read, and responded by calling Coach Smith? "I can't see your message. What do you want?"

Yes, I suggested that, too.

Many, many times.

But apparently there were notifications from professors and deans and regional fraternity councils and such like where calling would not be an option. Youngest Son complained bitterly that he was missing job opportunities as well.

He knew that would get me.

Still, I was going to hold out. Lawyers laughed at me in the courthouse when I pulled out my dumb phone to make a call. They pulled out their oh-so-smartphones to schedule, to post on Facebook, to read vital emails that they could see in two minutes when they got back to their office. But I was resolute. I didn't need a phone with all this stuff on it when I had computers with large, easy-to-read screens. No one was going to swipe a newspaper from me, or a book, as I rode home on the subway -- could these peacocks say the same for their very smart phones? No, sir. Not at all.

In the end, of course, it was Long Suffering Spouse who crumbled. You will get him a phone before he goes back to school, she finally told me. Youngest Son did his best not to turn handstands with glee.

Perhaps she chafed more than I realized at the thought that her students, seeing her ancient phone, did not recognize it as such. "Is that a phone?" one would ask. "Really?"

And, of course, our old phones were useless for storing and displaying pictures of our grandbaby.

Well, we took Youngest Son back to school on Sunday. His tuition is not paid. My real estate taxes are not paid. I pointed out that adding new expenses was not a good plan at this time.

My defenses held until Saturday.

There we were, at Costco, buying phones. I had one hope. They had to run my credit. Surely my credit rating must have cracked under the enormous weight of over $50,000 in credit card debt!

But, no.

Now I have over $51,000 in credit card debt and a smart phone that sits here mocking me.

What? You think I'd buy him a fancy-schmancy phone and not get one for me and the missus, too?