The sister and I are having phone woes. Her screen is fuzzy. My phone is scratched and out of date.
“I can barely make out texts anymore,” she told me recently.
“Me neither,” I said. “And my camera’s acting strange.”
These, admittedly, are the mother of all First World problems. Heck, even a decade ago, it would not have occurred to me that a telephone could even be a camera. And a text, way back then, was a heavy, rectangular thing that you lugged back and forth to school in your backpack.
Still, our devices are giving us grief. So what will we do? Live with it.
“Getting a new phone can be so complicated,” the sister said.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “When I got this baby” — I waved the out-of-date, scratched-up phone — “they started talking about the operating system. Do you know what an operating system is?”
“Haven’t a clue,” said the sister, looking sadly at her fuzzy phone. “I don’t know what iOS is either. Or cloud storage. What the heck is cloud storage anyway?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Weird,” I said. “Of all the things you can store, it seems to me a cloud would be the most difficult.”
The sister studied her phone. It appeared that someone had sent her a text, but she wasn’t completely sure.
A new phone was needed, but she wouldn’t likely get one.
“Think about it,” she said. “When you get a new phone, you have to go through that horrible business about setting up a new plan.”
“I know!” I said. “You have to talk activation fees and length of contract and amount of data. I haven’t a clue how much data I need.”
“Me neither,” said the sister. “And those people always talk so fast.”
I agreed completely.
“What kind of plan do you have right now?” I asked.
“No idea,” she said. “It’s just a, you know, phone plan.”
“Yes,” she said. “Same here.”
We would, we decided, grin and bear it and live with our scratches and fuzz.
“You know,” I said, “we were quite happy back in the day. I mean, before we could read any incoming texts.”
The sister nodded.
Back in the day, I added, life was simpler. I liked it when clouds were just things in the sky, since I’d never have known where to store them.
