I remember the first time I texted. It was 2003, and my wife got me one of those tiny Nokia pay-as-you-go, rectangular, gray, tiny-buttoned relics. I had no use for this thing, because I’ve hated talking to people in general since birth, but more specifically on the phone. She insisted that I get one so she could call me in case of an emergency, or she needed me to get some eggs on the way home. To this day, I still cringe whenever I hear a ringtone, because I have to make a split-second decision if I want someone to ruin my day, by talking to me on the phone.

I still have nightmares about the jobs I had it telemarketing and customer service where one call could ruin my whole day or even week. I had the unfortunate luck to answer a call at work and it literally took me the entire week to resolve grievance from that customer. If I had waited a second or two, that call would’ve gone to someone else, and they would’ve had to spend a week on fixing the stupid problem and I could’ve spent the rest of the week at my normal level of bitter.

Phone calls are the bane of my existence.

Texting on the other hand…is also the Bane of my existence. When I did that first text, people were telling me how great it was, because you could send someone a message over your phone without speaking to them. They said it saves having to make a phone call. The first time I tried it, I had to type a number on the number pad three times…just to put one letter on the screen. Then I had to do that over and over again to spell a word. Then again to complete a sentence, and I started to wonder why I had to have a PHD in computer science just to write a sentence, let alone to send it. And heaven forbid, I misspell a word. My anxiety goes through the roof whenever I see squiggly red lines underlining a word I spell wrong.

Of course, phones advanced over the years and texting became easier. The Blackberry started including a full keyboard, then Iphone included a touchscreen, then some company figured out speech-to-text. Then someone who hated humanity decided to introduce group texts.

If you’ve ever been included in a group chat (my family is infamous for these) without your permission, and see your phone buzzing like the huge hornet’s nest right outside your window right now, you know that the devil himself hates group texts. We can somehow land a Rover on Mars, but no one in the world has figured out a way to leave a group text. If someone ever does figure that out, they should recieve the EGOT, the Nobel Peace Prize and recieve a key to every city and house in the world.

It would solve perhaps the most irritating thing for me, and most certainly every other introvert in the world’s need for peace.

Just like Charmander evolving into a Charizard, phones hyperevolved over the span of my life. They went from a three-ring circus (by three ring, I mean, you had to stick your finger in a hole over a number and rotate it 180 degrees 7-10 times just to call someone) with a cord connected to your wall, and payphones at locations around the city, to one with an antenna that you could carry around the house, to a thing you could attach to your car, to one that you could text a letter after four pushes on a phone pad, to the current handheld computer that you can fit in your pocket that is more powerful than your home computer, and is probably more expensive than your mortgage.

Honestly though, I think at this point, we’re giving Alexander Graham Bell a little too much credit by calling these things phones. If you asked the average person (if that average person were an introvert), they would say the phone app is their least favorite and least used one on the whole device. (In fact, I think my device put the phone app in deep sleep because I never use it.) I think it’s past time to start calling them anything BUT a phone. I like to call it a texting machine, but you could call it a number of other things, like an expensive Instagram scroller, a Tik Tok video sharing device, an expensive handheld gaming machine, or as I called it earlier, a handheld computer.

That last thing we should be calling these things are phones. They look nothing like those rotary dialing things AGB tortured us with.

Another thing I could call it is my electronic brain or my metallic hand extension. If I wanted to get a hold of someone when I was young (usually don’t), I had to write some sort of contact name, phone number, or house address on a piece of paper. Or hope that I randomly ran into that person again. Nowadays, if I see someone, I can take a mental picture of them in my brain, get a first or last name, or find out if they had a scar on their chin, tell my daughter and she could use her phone and detective skills to identify anyone who has ever lived. She could then text me Thomas Jefferson or Noah’s Instagram, Facebook, Kickstarter, Venmo and phone number (like I would ever want that) in seconds.

Thanks to the ever-present notifications that all the apps insist on you having, I can’t go more than a few seconds without seeing a notification pop up and think I have to check my phone. No wonder my right (and write) hand is so much heavier than my left. It would be easier if a surgeon could surgically attach my texting machine to my hand/arm, so I didn’t have separation anxiety every time I have to charge it at night. In fact, while you are surgically attaching the phone, go ahead and give me a plug to recharge at night too. Maybe it could recharge me to 100% instead of the 50% I get on my best nights.

While you are contemplating futuristic yet intriguing surgeries, I’ll go ahead and post some Bitter Friday Giftures…

How the cavemen…

How we communicated…

How I used to be informed that we…

Now someone pulls out their computer…

If you think that phone calls or texting is bad…

But there is something worse…

Something so bad…

It’s even worse…

It called…

Once you have been attached to a group text…

No matter how hard you try…

And they will blow up your phone…

ARRGGGHHHHHH

Bitter Phone by any other name Ben