Smart Phones Are Fine In Moderation

This is the year most 1958 high-school graduates become octogenarians.

With those eight decades of living comes wisdom. Most of us now know, everything In moderation and we will be fine.

We have learned to cope with so many changes. Hair care, transportation, medical care and food have all morphed beyond our wildest imaginations. Nothing has changed quite so much as communication.

In 1958, forms of communication were limited. We could go face-to-face; we could write a letter add a three-cent stamp and hope it would arrive at its destination in a week or so. Or, we could pick up the telephone and place a call. A long-distance call was a big deal, a large expense and therefore, limited. We could not talk for extended periods of time to a local friend. We all had party lines and a friendly neighbor would bang the receiver in an attempt to have a go at her own communications.

Little did we expect email to be in our future. Some of my classmates still refuse this form of communicating. I think they are missing something. An email can be read when the recipient has time to do so, and return an answer when convenient. It is so much faster and more efficient than snail mail.

Phone changes

Changes in telephone communicating is another story. Picking up the receiver and speaking with the operator is a thing of the past. We no longer twirl a finger in a hole to dial a number, something today's young people know nothing about.

Then there are the cell phones. My husband and I are stuck in early-2000 telephone technology. We have a flipper phone. It is handy if our car breaks down or some other emergency occurs. I have no desire to chit-chat when busy doing something else and I have difficulty remembering to turn it on or even knowing where it is.

For what it is worth, today's millennials have taken smart phones too far with apps for everything from grocery shopping to buying a movie ticket.

Two examples of apps gone wild occurred recently. On Christmas morning, we were at a hotel in Salt Lake City. It snowed the night before, prohibiting folks from getting to work and a frazzled kitchen overseer was stuck with the front desk.

A young man who had just finished breakfast was anxious to get to the ski slopes. His skis were in his room, accessible with an app on his phone. The app was not working and the lady at the front desk (a/k/a the kitchen overseer) did not know how to make keys. Hint: Accept a key at check-in.

The Democrat caucus upset in Iowa is another app gone wild. A group of millennial Democrats decided that voting could be modernized with an app and thus we had the Iowa caucus fiasco.

Instead of votes counted instantaneously, it took days. The Democrat candidates are all a joke anyway. We have the old Vermont socialist, the wanna-be Indian, the old man with the touchy-feely hands who refers to young women as "dog-faced pony liars," or the mayor of a failed city. No one worth an app.

Needless to say, I am not a fan of smart phones. It is as though the young folks have an appendage stuck to their ears. I see children in restaurants ignored by their phone-chatting parents. Young people have lost their ability to talk, instead texting to the person sitting across from them.

As mentioned in the first paragraph of this column, one of the "ancient" forms of communication was face-to-face. That chance is offered to the family enjoying dinner out, but they are too wrapped up in their "outside" worlds to enjoy the company of each other.

Never noticed

We experienced an amusing phone incident recently at a Japanese steak house. A young woman had been taken to lunch by her parents. Instead of conversing with them, she was totally wrapped up in her phone. The chef teasingly tossed a bit of onion on her plate and she never noticed.

There's an old saying, "Everything in moderation and you will be fine." This applies to the foods we eat, the way we dress, how we spend our money, and certainly to communicating. Take some advice from a soon-to-be octogenarian and put the phone away while you smell the roses. Instead of moving your thumbs over the tiny keyboard, actually speak to a friend. If out to dinner, communicate with your companions. Look at and enjoy the changing seasons, or the museum you are visiting. Save the phone for those few minutes in the day when you literally have nothing else to do.