Stanley Bing writes a regular humor column in Fortune but this one’s a keeper! Driving while replying… please! I only check messages on my Treo while cruising at highway speeds. Well, OK, I guess I’ve replied to a few including IM. ahem…
Ah, sweet and capable instrument! The things you have shown me in our time! Information about new business prospects that pop up like truffles overnight in your digital field. Amusing messages from friends speaking through their implements to mine, one BlackBerry to another. Important data that shaped my thinking when my mind was occupied with nothing but which wine to select, which exit to take on the Interstate …
Ah, dangerous love! How many times have I fired off messages, thumbs blazing, while driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour! Was I mad? Yes. I was insane with the potential of our relationship. It was you and I, and when we were in a zone where we could not communicate, when your bars went down to zero, how often did I lean out the window, drive to high ground, weasel my way to another location to see whether I could bring you to life?
Ah! How often did you and I wait together in a restaurant for a tardy companion, only to look around and see everyone else peering into his electronic pal and thumbing madly like a raccoon washing its food in a frosty river? Oh, my plastic fantastic love! My heart is breaking! Hear it breaking? Or at least buzzing with an unhealthy rattle that signifies catastrophic systemic failure?
Because I don’t love you anymore.
It started when I got a new incarnation of you. This one is blue. The screen is odd. The font is skinny and sans serif and tough to read. The backlight, too, is feeble and intermittent. You’re now ultrasleek and a little bit plump and so up-to-the-minute. Like everything else in this technologically intensive society, you’ve been improved to the point of being slightly less satisfying in some way. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. [Fortune]