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Turning Android (okay, Smartphone) Like Everyone Else.

June 24, 2013 by Exangel

by Mathew Klickstein

Why is it that I’m spending my Saturday morning filled with equal parts excitation and dread? It is because it is this Saturday – today, in a few hours – that I will step into the Verizon store and finally join the hordes that have transitioned from classic feature phone to super smartphone.

This is my last morning without a smartphone.

I’ve had my little Nokia feature phone for so long that I can’t even remember when I switched to it from my bulky flip phone that came along after I realized I couldn’t very well work in LA’s film industry answering calls from pay phones any longer.

It was my principled tenacity that kept me from getting a cell phone in college, but once producers of shows I was working on couldn’t get in touch right away, I realized these luddite principles were just making me an obnoxious asshole no one could ever reach.

Now I’m finding the same problem with my feature phone, the tiny little gadget that slips easily into my pocket, can be dropped a million times without even losing a call, and whose only recent app is the clear tape I’m using to keep it held together. (Before, the tape was this blue masking tape that was more durable but made phone use an added chore for lack of screen visibility.)

People are always wondering why I can’t receive pictures on my phone. They want to know why they have to give me such detailed directions (“Jesus, Matt, just use your GPS!”). I’ve had old friends call me from time to time and along with asking if I still eat a jalapeño every day at lunch, there’s the inevitable, “Do you still have that same old phone?”

Yes, I still have that same old phone. Yes, it’s old. Yes, it doesn’t have GPS and does not receive pictures. In fact, even when people send me pictures, I receive only an error message … that doesn’t even bother to tell me who sent me the picture.

But I wouldn’t say my Nokia feature phone sucks. For one thing, I’ve had it so long that the plan I’m using is incredibly inexpensive (and for unlimited text and calls). I actually phoned AT&T a few months ago to check on that and after pausing for a moment, the operator got back on with me a little flustered, “Wow, uh, sir, you actually got this plan so long ago we don’t have anything to compete with it now. You should stick with what you’ve got.”

For the plan, that is. She – along with everyone else I talk to when I discuss phone-ness with my AT&T operator friends – can’t help but let me know how very overdue I am for a phone upgrade.

Why have I kept it all these years? Why hold out for a smartphone?

As a phone, my Nokia works great. Yes, it drops calls like everyone else’s phone. Yes, sometimes reception renders the call bombarded by what sounds like Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” (which is fine by me but not always so great for people who never really “got” Velvet Underground or who need to tell me something really important without being cut off by howling feedback).

As a phone, my phone is a great phone.

I remember just a few months back being in Central Park watching a symphony with some friends and everyone was using their iPhones as homing devices to get other friends to find where we were in the park and to play awesome-looking videogames while waiting for the show to start and to make 3D movies and launch rockets and god-knows-what. But, when a call needed to be made by someone, well, they each had to use my crummy old feature phone enveloped in scotch tape because it was the only one that got reception.

But now those halcyon days are over. It’s smartphone time. It’s 2013. I need GPS. I need to be able to check emails and GChat and Twitter and everything else constantly. We live in a world that would have terrorized Aldous Huxley, but we’re here and I’m here and I have responsibilities and bills to pay and I need to have a smartphone.

I’m afraid of what will happen when I drop that smartphone. Don’t they break so easily? What happens if it freezes? What happens if I lose all my data? How do you work these new-fangled things anyway? Am I going to be stranded somewhere and have no idea how to even make a call? Tiles? What is that? Can I use my Windows 8 phone with my laptop? Wait, do I need a laptop anymore?

Do I need a key to unlock my phone? Do I get in trouble if I jailbreak my phone? That sounds terribly illegal just by name alone!

And then a great calm washes over me. I’ve been holding off for far too long. I’m looking at my inert, black phone with the tiny keypad whose numbers have worn off. It’s laying there, perched carelessly atop the beige, wrinkled blanket next to my girlfriend’s tucked in peach-colored feet.

It seems to be looking at me, knowing what’s next. It’s the look our family dog gave us at the vet’s office that day when we left without her. It is a knowing look, the look of, “Let me go, Matt.”

I will let it go, I will get my smartphone (likely a Lumia 822, free with my Verizon contract and what I’ve been told is a good “starter” phone for children like me). I will stop hounding my friends for directions and stop running from coffee shop to coffee shop with my bulky laptop (who soon will be switched up too, oh yes) to check for important emails.

I will, after this day, be a smartphone user. Just like everyone else.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Summer 2013: Monsters.

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  • Who Was Dorothy?
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In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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