Me nEw Iphome

Over the Christmas break, I received the latest and greatest "Geek Toy," the iPhone. I have spent a considerable amount of time getting the phone part set up, learning how to cruise the web, making ring-tones and hours and hours of MaJong. It is a marvelous piece of engineering. The data age is really here, and I suppose that future versions will have holographic projections and the ability to wash dishes.

Of course, one of the marvelous and most useful things about it is the ability to receive and send emails from any location. Getting the emails is easy, and throwing the spam out is as easy as it would be on any software. Here, though, is where I have a lot of trouble with the iPhone. There is this little 'touch-screen' keyboard that pops up whenever you wish to actually send an email, because, presumably, you may actually want to have some "content" in the emails that you send. I can get content in there, but it is not english.

MICROSCOPIC KEYPAD LETTERS

The keyboard would be fine if I had hands with fingers the size of long-used number two pencil. As it is, I never can get the right letter to show up the first, second, and sometimes fifth try. I have spent some time trying this.

My wife said "Just take your time, learn where things are and you will have no trouble."

She has fingers the size of small number two lead pencils.

Nevertheless, I launched myself at this project with some considerable fervor, and the result has been that my co-workers think I must have had a brain aneurism. The first things to go were words longer than a few letters long. Prepositional phrases have gone by the wayside, as most of my email sentences from the iPhone now consist mostly of a noun and a verb. If I hold my tongue just right and work up a sweat, I might just get something that resembles a predicate, but do not place bets on that. Allow me to illustrate this phenomenon.

A previous email to my boss would likely look something like this:

*****************************************

Dear Mr. Whitescale,

In accordance with your previous inquiry, I am attaching a spreadsheet that clearly shows recruiting trends among our third tier students have greatly improved with our new, and enhanced, mailing sequence. I eagerly look forward to your response to this new data, and hope that we can meet soon to discuss how we can further increase our productivity.

Sincerely yours,

Phelonius Blatherskite, Esq.

*****************************************

The same email through the iPhone now looks more like this:

*****************************************

dUDee,

Tou asjed. Hwere isd a soreedhute. We iz Bettert. Trawlk soon, LOL

ME

*****************************************

Something tells me that if I just avoid trying to email anybody anything, I just might be able to keep my job, and keep my friends from sending an ambulance over to see if I am not overdosing on crack. It is either that, or I start filing the ends of my fingers down into tiny stumps. So much for technology solving everything.