Is your phone smarter than you?
Smarter than both of us?
Gadget guru David Pogue‘s phone outsmarted the thief who unwisely lifted it on a train whizzing along the northeast coastline. Pogue, as reported in an interview with PBS NewsHour‘s Jeffery Brown, arrived in New York minus his phone, and immediately set to work tracking it down. With a little help from an app or two, he located it somewhere in Maryland. Then, with a little more help from Google maps and a million+ Twitter followers, he located the precise house where the hapless thief and his booty were holed up. A few astute policemen eventually heard the loud beeps that Pogue was instructing his phone to emit, scooped up their prey from deep in the grass of the back yard and started it on a journey home. The thief got off lightly — Pogue and cops all being more interested in bringing the whole interstate adventure to a close than in filing a lot of time-&-labor-intensive papers. But for a while he’ll probably stick to wallets.
My phone is not quite that smart. But I do, after intense pressure from friends and relations about the age of Pogue — whose grandmother is about my age I would guess — now have a smartphone. It may not be smart enough (or app-loaded enough) to help me find it if someone snatches it, but it is smart enough to do a LOT of things I am not smart enough to ask. Yet.
I bring all this up because I increasingly believe all that stuff about Boomers and geezers being incapable of adjusting to the age of technology is hogwash. Before becoming a smartphone owner, OK, maybe I believed. Now? Nahh. Now that I have successfully installed our new computer modem, reconfigured the router (take that, $89/hr Geek Squad) to get us back online a couple of weeks ago, fiddled around with the background color of this emerging blogsite and made a few moves with my smartphone……. all things are possible.
And anyway. David Pogue wasn’t smart enough to avoid getting his iPhone snatched. I don’t think he even has a BA in Art or an MFA in Short Fiction.
Belated thanks, Betty! I hope you’ll accept today’s post as apology for missing your good comment.
That’s like waving a red flag…..hearing that geezers can’t figure out something. Hogwash! It depends on whether or not we choose to figure it out.
I enjoy reading your writing, so I know your book will be right on!