| Mike Pirtle: Dang, what's your phone number ... again |
|
|
Posted: Sunday, August 2, 2009 8:15 am
|
 Email  Print
|
I don’t know my daughter’s phone number.
Nor two of my three brothers.
Or my sister’s.
And, probably 95 percent of my friends’.
The five percent of my friends who I can remember their home phone numbers are the ones who were later than most to either obtain a cell phone or widely distribute the number.
Now I can remember my mom’s home number, but not her cell number.
And, my wife and son’s cell numbers.
And, the office number for almost every place I have ever worked, including three part-time jobs way, way back in my college days.
But, that was before memory functions on home phones and address books on cell phones.
My older brother, Mark, can still amaze folks with his ability to spout seemingly anybody’s phone number off the top of his head. Course, he can also go into a restaurant a year later and remember the waiter/waitress’ name if he gets the same one. I have trouble remembering if the server bringing me my latest meal is male or female.
Modern technology puts about 20 phones number at our finger tips with most home phones, and I don’t know how many on cell phones anymore except that it’s a whole bunch.
I can order pizza from any one of my four favorite places by punching exactly one button on the home phone. In fact, they are the only recorded numbers I still remember the speed dial number for except 911 which is “1” as we are advised by emergency services people although I’m pretty sure I can still remember that number most days.
Since we know it’s important to exercise our minds, I worry about the mental flab that may result from phone number memory functions.
Before the speed dial numbers and other technological innovations, I kinda prided myself on how many friends, family and pizza delivers’ numbers I could remember.
Now, I would likely die lonely and hungry if I fell and couldn’t get up if it weren’t for 911.
What happens if some demented computer hacker, and there seem to be a lot of them with bizarre motivations, figures out some way to blank all our address books and recent calls memory areas on our cell phones in one fell swoop?
Would we have to make new friends?
Start writing letters?
Send messages by UPS?
Just wondering.
•••
After five hours of shrubbery trimming last weekend, I have decided I would certainly like to have five minutes alone in an empty room with whomever:
- Introduced English privet to America. I long ago thought I hated all the places for flowers, bushes and small trees in our yard, but my missus keeps telling me I am wrong, that instead I like all the flowering plant life and should continue to enjoy spending countless hours every year trimming, weeding and cutting back the various and sundry flora.
Every time I do such work I find myself chopping, snipping or trying to simply jerk out of the ground sprigs of privet. We don’t really have any established privet in the lawn but obviously at some time there was some and its breeding patterns would make rabbits feel like eunuchs.
Stuff is tough, too.
– Got folks to plant monkey grass of any variety. OK, this one was self-imposed by about half. I will let you figure out which one of the Pirtle couple decided to spread it. The stuff thinks Roundup is fertilizer, doesn’t care if it never rains or rains all the time and probably will survive nuclear apocalypse along with the cockroaches.
– Euanamous. Once planted this nondescript shrub never ever dies. It may be damaged and take on an ugly, ungainly form but it won’t die. And, you can’t dig it up. Some part always survives, eventually pops back out of the earth and starts growing like the blazes.
Do our Second Amendment rights include flamethrowers?
Just wondering.
|
|
Digg
Facebook
MySpace
StumbleUpon
Google
Yahoo!