Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Eat The Brick


So I was posted to on-call duty this week at work. This means that I get to carry around the work phone and whenever something breaks at work, I get a call. Luckily, knock-on-wood, nothing really terrible has happened. There's still tonight — I get to give it up at noon tomorrow.

So to make sure the phone is a useful tool, the company bought a "smart phone." This, to me, feels like a bit of a misnomer. I have instead dubbed the work phone "the Brick," mainly because it is about the size of a regular housing brick and weighs as much. It feels utterly ridiculous to talk into. I feel sort of like I'm talking into a laptop, but not by the usual method of microphone and headset, rather, by holding the entire stinking notebook up against the side of my head.

The software for this thing is ridiculous. When I received the phone on Monday, a holiday in Canada, it was in this weird state, where, despite having an infinite number of non-phone functions, the only one that would actually work was the phone function.

"Try rebooting," suggested M.

I did. No such luck.

On Tuesday I showed the phone to T, my boss.

"Did you try rebooting?" asked T.

"Yes."

"Here. Lemme try." He started up google maps, the first internet application he could find. It told him it was going to have to reboot. Bam. Down it went. Then it went to a screen I don't remember seeing when I rebooted it. Came back up. Suddenly e-mail and web worked.

"You know there are multiple levels of rebooting to these things," chided T.

"Yeah, you know what else would reboot it? Putting it under a streetcar," I pouted back. "Smart phone my rear end."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hilarious. Reminds me of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141171