Using Our Smart Phones For Thumb Fitness

WE AMERICANS HAVE FORGOTTEN how to use our telephones, it seems like, almost. Until fairly recently, phones were used to talk to each other, at each other, or through each other, using vocal chords. A phone was a big, immobile box sitting on the table in the corner, and when it rang, we jumped and ran to answer it, because that was our one and only shot. Otherwise, we would never know who called. Now we stare blankly at them while walking into telephone poles, or driving into ditches, or engendering the annoyance of the cop in his car with a radar gun and an eye for other people's bad choices. We punch them with our thumbs, truncating and destroying the King's English. That's all well and good, of course. To each his own, and all that. Its all good, unless one actually collides with an object at rest while serving as an object in motion, obliviously. Unless one's thumbs develop arthritis. Nobody like to use a telephone in the traditional manner - everybody says that, just like everybody says "I don't get mad very often, but when I do, watch out!". The only people who actually like being vocally on a telephone were teenagers between 1940 and 1990. Today's millenails and teens text, and only text, far as the eye can tell. Try calling somebody, nobody ever answers their phone, even though its in their front pocket. They are "doing" lunch, and simply cannot be bothered. What the hell, my time is valuable, the caller's is not, so, screen it baby. You leave a voice mail; nobody ever calls back. They text. Ah, there was a time, in the halcyon days of telephonic yore, when such behavior was considered rude. Our smart phones may be dumbing down our language skills and inundating us with cancer causing microwave radiation, but by God, they have raised the bar on rudeness, and, really, if we amdit it, that's what we all want.