Front Porch: Some of us were happy in dumbphoneland

Dear Phone Companies:

For the love of God (or whatever universal force may be in play here), please stop sending unwanted and unasked-for updates to my phone.

Don’t you understand that there are so many of us out here in the wilderness, especially those of us with high mileage on our personal odometers, who can only handle so much technology change?

Not to mention all the vocabulary references. I mean, I’m still learning the meaning of substack, AITA hubs, agentic AI and a whole bunch of things that seem to be known only by their acronyms (kind of like one-name celebrities Cher, Rhianna and Denzel), references that seem to be popping up into my life, or at least onto my screen.

I don’t care about them and don’t want to know about them. And if ever I do, I’ll take the time to find out on my own – not when I’m mandated to have to deal with them. I didn’t sign up for that.

I still get disoriented when an update that I know is coming, occurs overnight, and in the morning an icon I’m used to seeing in one location is now accessible by clicking on something else first, and then pops up in a new place on the screen.

Don’t you realize the time and energy it takes me to get all that worked out? The effort to improve or streamline or whatever-the-heck is happening brings on digital vertigo.

Plus I find I then have to once again log in or enter passwords anew. The same is true for computer updates. And why do I have to have a bazillion passwords for every darn thing? Surely someone can take a minute to think of a fix for that. And whoever does … well, I’ll write them into my will, I’ll be so grateful.

I only have so much intellectual bandwidth, and I resent having to burn gray matter to mess with my phone whenever the phone gods decide they want to toy with me.

I’m sure the public relations people at the mother ship of smartphoneland have reassuring words about improving security and providing all the latest geegaws that the public is clamoring for. Swell. I still don’t care.

I use my phone for just a few things. Interestingly enough, as a phone. I also text, check email, Google for information when I see or hear something I want to know more about, and a few other basic things (like ordering on Amazon). Don’t listen to music, watch movies, do online banking or avail myself of the other delights potentially available to me.

Please just leave my phone alone. Support the system as it is and let me go about my life in ignorant bliss. My husband would still be using his old flip phone, except the carrier would no longer support it. He used it as a phone and (rarely) to text. Period. You could have just left the poor guy alone.

He had to move to a smartphone. The learning curve was agony. He is very much an analog guy, and several times a week, even now, years later, he hands me his phone and asks me to “fix” it. You can’t imagine how pathetic it is that I am the tech person in our household. There isn’t an 8-year-old on the planet who isn’t better equipped to “fix” it than I am.

Sometimes the fix is very basic, but for a guy who can take a whole engine apart and rebuild it from scratch, he just doesn’t speak this language well. It just isn’t intuitive for him.

I muddle through mostly because the fix is often simple. For example, finding the right sequence of taps, especially when there’s been an update, is all it takes. But then the new move needs to be committed to memory … in a system that’s as foreign to him as for a kid today looking at an old rotary phone and not knowing how to make it work – only in reverse direction technologically.

When it’s more complicated, like the recent issue with phone messages not getting through, it’s off to the Verizon store I go.

We’re still working on swiping, which is a whole other thing. Bruce has a heavy hand and tends to poke the screen hard instead of lightly flicking to move to the next image. Finger-stabbing leads to different results than gentle swiping.

A soft touch doesn’t work when taking a rusted bolt out of something, and the transition from that to working a delicate phone is a larger chasm-leap than one might suspect. And for fat or arthritic fingers, hitting the teeny tiny keys leads to more typos (some rather funny) than necessary.

I can’t tell you how often I (of the arthritic finger generation) have typed “live it” rather than “love it.” Different meanings. One time when in communication with a bird-watcher friend, I intended to type the word “duck,” when I hit an incorrect consonant nearby instead. Truly.

If the phone gods want to improve things with all their updates, tackle some of those much more practical things, please, and/or leave us troglodytes alone to muddle along with our older – but understood – systems.

Thank you in advance.

Respectfully submitted,

Stefanie Pettit

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by e-mail at upwindsailor@comcast.net.