Can You Please Put Your Phone Down? 08/21/26

When I grew up there were wall phones with attached, twisty cords and rotary dials. I’m not going back to the days of Lassie, when you had to call an operator who then placed your call. And sometimes, if they were nosy, they’d listen in to your most private conversations and you’d get caught saying your Aunt Bea was a pain in the butt. Then came the Princess phone which you could use bedside, Then cordless and then, gasp, the cell phone. I once worked with a guy who was 16 years younger than me. Which meant he had a cell phone and was using it exclusively long before I was. I had a cell phone, I just didn’t use it. One time he saw me in the hallway and said, “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour!” I replied, “How were you trying to reach me?” He said, “I called your mobile phone.” I said, “Oh, I left it in my office.” He replied, “You’re supposed to take it with you, that’s why they call it a mobile phone.” I had to admit he had a point. And from then on, I started carrying this strange device in my pocket. But now it’s gotten out of hand, no pun intended. well, maybe a little bit intended.

These are a few of my pet phone peeves. Sitting down at a restaurant when everyone is making excellent eye contact. With their phones. Answering someone’s question and when you look up at them, they’re staring down at their phone. But sometimes you can’t help it. Somebody says a fact to me like, Remember when the Mets won it all in ‘85?” and I say, “I think it was ‘86.” I will not pull out my phone to prove the other guy wrong unless he says, Got your phone? Check it out.” And then there is the ubiquitous, “So how are the grandkids?” question. Immediately everyone’s phone comes out so we can all share these adorable pictures.

So John and I decided to do a 6-part series pointing out how dependent we’ve become on these phones. Almost everything we do now is on our phones. Finding a good place to park? SpotHero. Need a ticket to an event? StubHub. Hotel? Hotels.com for goodness sake. Just make sure you have enough battery life left. Excuse me, I think I have a call coming in.

That’s it for this week and we will see you next week with parts 3 and 4. Stay tuned, you can even read them on your phone. Have a great weekend,

Andy and John

Smart Devices 12/18/2020

Smart devices. They all promise to make our lives so much better. But are we smart enough to use them? There are smart refrigerators that tell you when you’re running low on milk, smart toaster ovens that know what you’ve put inside them and how long to bake or broil said item, smart watches, phones, tv’s, and I’m not smart enough to go on with more examples. Our first comic this week deals with a smartphone. Now if you are like me or John, you’ve gotten rid of your landline because it was just an expensive relic that did nothing more than receive useless junk calls. As time went on, my wife and I started ignoring our landline when it rang and our friends and family only called our cell phones. Eventually, the robocallers or bots caught on and now our smartphones get as many junk calls as our landlines used to get. Ahh, but we were smart, so we thought, so we’d outsmart our smartphones. First thing we did was sign up to the National Do Not Call Registry. Total waste of time. Next option was to immediately hang up after each call from Bluffton, Tenn. or Portsmouth, NH, where we didn’t know a soul. Then go into last call, info, and finally, block caller. Also not worth a hot damn. Because as soon as you block this particular number, whoever it is just calls you back on another number. As the pirates used to say, arghhhhhh! So we made a comic out of it. If anyone has any suggestions about how to defeat these seemingly endless crank calls, we’d love to hear about it and we’ll post it on the site, but until then, just don’t answer.

Next up is the smartwatch. I wonder if this happens to you. Almost every night I’ll be sitting on my couch around 10:30 or 11 when I feel a bump on my wrist. Inevitably it’s my watch, telling me it’s time to breathe. And immediately I think, do I really need a reminder telling me it’s time to breathe? Isn’t that sort of obvious? I mean, don’t you need to breathe to be able to sort of, ‘ya know, live? Oh I know, they mean deep breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, but still, soooo annoying. What’ll it do next, tell me when it’s time to stand? Oh wait, it already does that. This next part is no joke. Kara Swisher from the N.Y. Times wrote that she bought a new watch to test for a column she was writing. The watch measured her pulse and told her, among other things, that she seemed upset at 4:46 pm yesterday and happy at 9:27 pm. Can’t you see it now, an ad for an antidepressant or Tito’s Vodka at 4:47 followed by a promo for a new romantic comedy at 9:28? The more and more devices are thinking for us, the less and less we are being asked to think for ourselves. Now if only someone can come up with a program to write this blog I can lie down and take a nap. John, who cannot be replaced by a bot, is busy working on our Christmas Card.

Have a great weekend and Happy Holidays,

Andy and John