Hello, New Phone!

While almost everybody is using smartphones, I still cling on to the conventional ones.
Those with button keyboards, if you still remember them.
My love for button keyboards is probably as intense as my love for paper-tearing.
Same in a sense that both of them are weird obsessions that seems like I'm the only one who stubbornly have them.

The idea of using touchscreen is, at least the way I see it, bizarre.
Fingertips is one of the body parts which has the strongest sense of touch.
Why on earth would people choose to lose their sense of touch, in favour of a smooth screen that gives no sensation at all?
Up to this point, I still find it incomprehensible.
And when I bring this question to people around me, no one seem to have an idea and an interest to solve it.
'Are you from another time or planet?' Sometimes they say it, other times it is written all over their faces.

So, me having a brand new smartphone, one of the latest models, has enough shock factor for people who know me.

A short conversation between me and my 14 year-old brother:
Me: Felix, teach me how to use the S3. (eagerly, like a child with a new toy)
Him: Yea, right. You must be kidding. You don't use those things.
Me: Oh, really? (raised an eyebrow as I took the phone out and flashed it in front of him)
Him: What?! I can't imagine you using that.
Me: Well, believe it or not, BRO. (evil grin)
Him: Ok, I'm not teaching you anything.
Me: Pleeeeeeease. (completely change of attitude, miserable)

The phone itself shocks me as much as I shocked my brother.
Readers, don't laugh at me: I lost count of the number of times I gasped or screamed when I experiment with the new gadget.
Yes, it's real: I literally lost count. And I literally gasped and screamed.
With both horror and/or amazement.
All for a damn phone.

It happened like this:
When I set up the apps for social networking or communications, everybody's' pictures and statuses popped up with a sec, I gasped.
I feel connected, in a bad way. Or I should put it as 'exposed'.
I prefer keeping a distance from most of the people I know.
Now they are all there! Bombarding me with their where-abouts and what-abouts.
Ok, way too accessible, no thanks.

I let out another gasp when I got some texts.
To distinguish the sounds of my phone from my family members' phones, I randomly picked something.
So when I got a msg, my phone let out a loud bird's chirp and vibrated.
It scared me.

For people who know me in person, you'll know that my another weird obsession is that I don't like phones that produce noise.
I don't really like it when mobile phones ring.
Odd enough, I'm okay with my home phone ringing.
I guess one of the reasons is that I never find a suitable ringtone.

Apparently my family thinks it's funny and cute that I gasp and scream like an idiot, so entertaining that they left me to experiment with the gadget that is smarter than me.
Having a phone that is smarter than a human being is a pretty weird thing.
But not as scary as those artificial intelligence robots.
(It is so wrong to create sth that look so similiar to human beings. Those things creep me out.)
I'd compare me having a 'smart' phone to a man being emasculated, even though I'm not a man and would certainly not know how it feels to be emasculated.
Ouch!

Oh, talking about men, I have no idea why electronic gadgets only seem to operate smoothly in the hands of a man.
Maybe they operates well in everyone's hands. Except mine.
I swear I did the same thing, be it setting up wifi or the new phone, but nothing happened.
But once a man touches it, magic happens.
While men exclaimed, 'voila! There it is', I grumbled, 'what?!'

Another thing that made me surrender is texting.
I shouldn't have laughed at iPhone users who make typos when they text.
Or in some cases, extremely funny mistakes after the autocorrect.
I didn't know I have clumsy fingers myself!
Can't help but 'urgh!' when I typed 5 letters and have 3 of them wrong.
As if this isn't bad enough, I continued to make a series of txts with typos.
Clumsy fingers on touchscreen keyboard VS obsession with perfect spelling.
Who won? Let's say I compromised.

Okay, that's about my little struggle with modern day technology.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm truly excited about new things that will make my life slightly easier.
Just that, like every beginning or change, it takes a bit effort and time to adapt and adjust.
This is one of the many days that I feel like I was born in the wrong era.

Love,
N