Just a Smidge: September 2024

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

I'm Not Mad, I'm Just Old

You know the old saying, “Looking down your nose at someone?”

It means you disapprove of them or the way they’re acting, or you consider them inferior or unworthy.

I think the origins of that saying may have just been a misunderstanding, because I am starting to look down my nose at everyone.

You see, it all starts somewhere between forty and fifty years old, when your perfectly good eyes decide they have been working too hard for too long and it’s now time to relax.

You’ll be cruising right along, enjoying your carefree life, when all of a sudden, one evening in a dimly-lit room, the directions on that label or the serial number on that sticker don’t seem to be printed very clearly.

You’ll blame inferior fuzzy Chinese inkjet printing for a few days, or weeks, until you realize that holding that label a little farther away from your face brings that very clearly-printed text into focus.

Hmm… That’s odd.

You’ll just get into the habit of reading things farther away from your eyes for the next few months, or years, pretending that you’ve always done it this way, until one fateful day you discover your arms are somehow shorter than they used to be. You can no longer hold the fine print far enough away from your face.

You think about getting one of those trash grabber claws to hold things out further, but then you notice a pair of your wife’s magnifying reader glasses sitting on the counter.

You don’t need glasses, because you can still see things in the room and you can read street signs just fine. Your eyes are great, and besides, you’re not old. But you say to yourself, “I wonder what things look like with those? Probably so crazy-magnified with my strong vision that they’ll make me want to throw up. But I should try them just to see…”

And then you put them on…

Holy crap, this counter has crumbs all over it. Where were those a second ago? And my God! I can read this note sitting on the counter so CLEARLY! But then you look up out into the living room and everything out there is blurry now and giving you a headache.

And just like that, the transition has begun. You will need magnifying glasses from here on out.

You will buy yourself twenty-five cheap pairs of readers from Amazon and spread them all over your life so that you’ll always be able to read the words, and thread the needle, and see the slot for the screwdriver. But you won’t need or want them to watch TV, or drive, or talk to someone.

So now you’re carrying readers around with you everywhere you go and complaining about how dimly lit the restaurant is. And while you’re perusing the menu and discussing the entrees with your tablemates, you have a problem. You need the readers to see the menu, but not to see the people. So, what do you do…?

You put your readers out on the end of your nose. Now you can tilt your head back to read the menu with your readers, and tilt your head forward to see your friends, over the top of your glasses.

And in that moment, the transition is complete. You are old.

You now look and act like every old person you’ve ever seen in a movie or when you were younger, tilting their head back and forth and peering over their glasses at they speak to the person interrupting them from reading the newspaper.

You always thought those old people looked so disapproving of whomever they were talking to, because they were literally looking down their nose at them. But now you realize, they were just trying to see them clearly and were tired of taking their readers on and off.

You have become them.

And then it hits you – Oh, man, what are people thinking I’m thinking??

So, I just want to make it clear on behalf of myself and all my fellow reader-needers out there – we’re not looking down our noses at you just because we’re looking down our noses at you!

We’re just trying to see you as clearly as we can see our phone, our book, or our food. So please, don’t read anything into it.

Unless, of course, you’re being an idiot. Then we’re definitely looking down our noses at you – both ways.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

An Open Letter to Apple and Samsung

Dear Apple and Samsung,

You suck.

Mostly you, Apple, but Samsung, you have some work to do, too.

Let’s start with you, Apple. iMessage is stupid. What a fun and exciting messaging app that can only be used between two people who have iPhones, iPads, iWatches, and do you have something called iGlasses yet, because if not, your marketing team sucks, too.

You developed a way for people in your iCult to talk to each other and create named groups and heart each other’s cute posts and have all sorts of iCult fun. It’s actually pretty cool, but the problem is, you also try to use that same system as your texting feature. Believe it or not, over half of the people your iCult will need to text won’t have iDevices. We have Samsungs and seven of us have Google phones.

Up until Google got involved and brought the awesome, everyone except you, Apple, ran texts on SMS and MMS. Just so you know, since I’m not sure you do, SMS is single texts, MMS is pictures and group texts.

Here’s the main reason you suck: You have a built-in blocker for Samsung texts, and you don’t tell your users that they are missing things. You know damn well that a message arrived that you didn’t show them. You also know that you sent a message that didn’t get delivered, but you don’t tell them that either.

Instead, you leave it up to me, the Samsung user, to figure out that they aren’t getting my messages or I’m not getting theirs, then train them on how to go six layers deep into your menu options and turn on the little button that says “Send/Receive non iMessage communications as SMS/MMS.”

I mean, holy crap! The fact that that is not just automatically on all the time is proof that you are running a cult and want your members to think that everyone else’s phones suck except for yours. When in fact, it’s the exact opposite. As long as you let them out of the phone, we see your messages just fine without needing to change a single setting. If you think cult is too strong a word, look into how cults work to get their members to view everyone else who’s not in the cult…

Then along comes Google and gives us RCS. It’s a direct replacement for SMS/MMS as well as iMessage, and it has all the fun, cool features of iMessage. RCS stands for Really Can’tBelieve SamsungHasn’tJustDoneThisYet. Or Rich Communication Services. One of the two – I always forget which.

We have the ability to run this on our Samsungs, but we still have to use Google Messaging instead of the standard Samsung messaging app. C’mon, Samsung – just make the switch. Ditch the SMS/MMS and get with the times. RCS is just better.

And RCS solves the problem of getting separate texts about iPhone users in the group chat. No longer will you see, “Steve reacted to a photo,” or “Bob liked ‘Let’s meet at 5pm at th…’”

How hard was that to fix, Samsung? Everyone else has been able to heart someone’s text for a long time now, but Google had to show up in the phone game to get it done for you? That’s weak.

And speaking of weak, back to you Apple. You know damn well that RCS is the way to go, but you’re still not playing nice. If an iPhone user likes my text, I can see it now, but if I like theirs, still nada. You have been on a one-way street your whole life. Get with the program.

I mean, I know you’re worried that if the iCult is allowed to see what’s really out there, they might come to the startling conclusion that they’ve been overpaying for underperforming devices, but don’t you think it’s time to man up and face the iTunes?

I guess if you won’t do it on your own, the EU might be forcing your hand. I heard you pissed off all of Europe enough that they may be requiring you to be completely RCS compatible in the very near future.

Wouldn’t that be something? Sad that an overbearing government entity had to intervene, but at least they might get you to see the light and understand that locking yourself in your own room is not a great long-term business strategy.

I’d be happy to text you more about it, but it might not go through...

See you soon,

-Smidge

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Breaking Olympic Records

It has been 24 years since Eric Moussambani broke Olympic swimming records at the 2000 Sydney games, and to celebrate the anniversary, Paris brought us a close equivalent this summer – breakdancing.

You guys remember the new Olympic breakdancing, right? The sport where the bronze women's winner from China was named “671” and the men’s competition was basically a gymnastics floor routine, but with better music and comedic stylings.

And the poor guy from Kazakhstan who tried very hard but didn't win a single judge vote in three rounds, but you had to give him credit because he is from Kazakhstan and probably doesn’t have real internet at his house, so it was possible that he hadn’t ever seen actual breakdancing before he stepped on stage.

And then there was Raygun. The viral Australian breakdancer who literally couldn’t breakdance. She also didn’t get a single point from any of the judges in any of her rounds, but the difference was she knew what it was supposed to look like and showed up anyway. We all came to the same conclusion after her performance – incredibly, she is apparently the only female breakdancer in the entire country of Australia.

Well, Rachel “Raygun” Gunn has just been ranked number one in the world by breakdancing’s governing body, the World DanceSport Federation.

If you are saying, that’s insane, I had no idea that breakdancing had a world governing body, you’re not alone. I was right there with you. But rest assured, they are not just a group of teenagers vaping ecstasy like you would suspect. They have an actual reason for ranking someone as the best dancer in the world, after that person virally proved on the world stage that she can’t dance at all.

Apparently, in order for the athletes to focus on training for the Olympics, the Federation stopped holding ranking events in January. Since the world standings are based only on your last 52 weeks of scoring, almost all of the Olympic breakdancers left the games without a current Federation ranking.

Raygun currently has the top ranking because she came in first place at the 2023 Oceania Continental Championships, which was still inside the rankings timeframe, and presumably held in Raygun’s living room.

In spite of breakdancing even worse than I do at weddings, Rachael Gunn proudly declared that she had achieved exactly what she set out to do at the Paris Olympics.

"Some Olympians spend their entire lives training to make history, to carve out a name for themselves. I trained for exactly 37 minutes, and now I'm the most famous breakdancer in the world. My sick moves shut down an entire event. How many Olympians can say that?"

One that I know of, Rachel. If you knew your Olympic history, you would know about Eric the Eel, and the fact that he actually won his heat.

Eric Moussambani was a “swimmer” from Equatorial Guinea. Swimmer is in quotes there for when you Google the video – you’ll see.

Eric got to the 2000 summer games via a wildcard system that allowed people from developing nations to represent their countries without meeting the minimum requirements for their sport. Australia is not a developing nation, so that still doesn’t explain Raygun, but here we are, nonetheless.

Eric began training – and by that I mean learned to not die in the water – only eight months before the Olympics. He started training in a lake, and later in a 12-meter-long hotel pool where he worked. He could only use the pool between 5:00 and 6:00am, and he was there every day, Raygun. Every damn, day. It didn’t help much, but still.

Eric is the only Olympic swimmer to ever make the near-completely useless Olympic pool lifeguard get out of his chair. When Eric arrived in Sydney it was his first time ever seeing a 50-meter pool. Amazingly, he had entered into the 100-meter freestyle event instead of the 50-meter. Surely he had to know 50 was less than 100, so that choice remains a mystery to this day.

Eric got up on the blocks for his first heat and proceeded to turn in the slowest time ever recorded for the 100-meter freestyle, and that includes any youth swim meets you’ve ever been to. He would have finished much faster, but he lost all forward momentum in the last 20 meters and for some reason he took about eight strokes in the last three feet of the race. I’m not making that up.

The Eel was supposed to be swimming against two other men in his heat, but they both disqualified on their starts, so after almost two full minutes in the water , Eric won his one-man heat at the 2000 Olympic games and was inked into the history books for a record that may never be broken.

Eric embodied the Olympic spirit of determination and grit. I’m not quite sure what Raygun embodied after giving it a full 37-minutes of hard work, other than an obvious lack of coordination and skill, but I want to wish her a sincere congratulations on being ranked number one in the world.

Enjoy your free large fries at Arby’s, or whatever prize comes with a World DanceSport Federation top ranking in breakdancing.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

The Digital Tipping Point

A long time ago I realized that I had reached what I called the digital tipping point – when I decided that if I had to choose, I would much rather lose my wallet than my phone. I think a lot of us would agree with that.

I know Son Number Two probably would. He’s off in Idaho at his first year of college and taking advantage of all the exciting activities Boise State has to offer – one of the main ones being floating the Boise River.

The river makes up the entire northern border of the campus, and it’s perfect for floating in an innertube, as long as you don’t mind sitting in freezing cold water while the rest of you fries like an egg in a high-altitude skillet.

He called me after he had finished the Labor Day float this weekend. Of course, I had no idea he was calling me, because it was some random number showing up on my phone.

“Bad news, Dad…”

Life360 is still showing us the exact spot in the middle of the Boise River where his phone finally died. It’s presumably still there on the bottom, because the second he dropped it out of his tube he went straight down after it, but it was never to be seen again.

Now, to be an eighteen-year-old off at college without a phone is one thing, but this was an iPhone, and iPhones have that magnetic ring thing on the back. And there are countless companies that sell accessories that will magnetize to the back of your phone. One of the most popular of those accessories is a wallet that holds things like your credit card and ATM card and driver’s license.

He had one of those.

He also HAD a credit card, an ATM card, and a driver’s license.

I never gave any thought to the dreaded third option of the digital tipping point – losing BOTH your wallet and your phone in one tragic river tubing accident. But then, I don’t have my wallet attached to my phone, and I also don’t take either of them with me when I get into an innertube in a river. But I also have a fully developed frontal lobe that controls risk/reward, so I have an advantage there.

When you ship your kids off to college, you are really hoping they receive an education. One of the many things you hope they’ll learn in 2024 is how to better use email. That’s been a nice side benefit of having a son without a phone. His mom and I have Samsung phones, so he can’t just text us from his iPad, because the folks who brought you the “Genius Bar” still think SMS is just a fad and won’t catch on. So, he’s having to manage this with us through email, which has been instructional for him. He hasn’t really mastered Subjects yet, but baby steps.

He's also needing to problem solve. He found out the DMV won’t send your California driver’s license to another state, so he had to find someone here in the Golden State willing to mail it to him. I might charge him for my labor AND the postage.

And he currently has absolutely no way to purchase any goods or services. Kids these days are not big on having cash, so he’s in a bit of a pickle. (Although, if he had any cash, I guess it would be at the bottom of the Boise River too.)

Sixteen-year-old Son Number Three had it all figured out the other night. “Well, he doesn’t need the actual cards! He can just use ApplePay.”

“That might just work…”

“Yep.”

“…if he had a phone.”

“Oh, right…”

He could ask his roommates to front him some cash and Venmo them. But does Venmo even have a desktop-based version? Can you Venmo from an iPad? No one knows, because everyone else’s phones are not at the bottom of the Boise River.

Well, actually, there probably are a few others down there. My wife found a retired guy who runs a Facebook page for the Boise River Float Lost and Found. Apparently, he’s spending his retired years diving below the rapids and collecting the college kids’ lost treasures and selling them back to the kids/parents for a $100 flat fee.

Not in a million years would I pay him even $1.00 to retrieve my son’s phone and wallet for him. This extracurricular college lesson is far too valuable.

I mean, I could give this guy the Life360 exact location of where my son’s phone gave up the ghost, but I wouldn’t. If he randomly found it and contacted me, I’d be tempted to pay him $100 just to keep his mouth shut.