Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

BlackBerry Musings

My BlackBerry died Sunday morning or late Saturday night. Apparently, it decided it had worked long and hard enough and quit. After eight months. Must've had one heckof a retirement fund saved up. Either way, I'm up a creek.

My wife is nine months pregnant. I need a phone so she can call me at work in case our hibernating daughter decides it's time to introduce herself officially. Our last daughter was born in an hour. I work thirty minutes from home. We have three other young daughters who will need to stay with Grandma. A cell phone is a necessity.

After speaking to a sympathetic T-Mobile operator, I'm informed about a "loaner program" available at any store location. A $50 deposit and I can borrow a phone until my new BlackBerry arrives in the mail. No muss, no fuss. Yeah, right.

Not surprisingly, my loaner phone is inferior to my normal phone. No Internet access in the palm of my hand. No e-mail. No score updates. No QWERTY keyboard for texting. No Brickbreaker. By Wednesday, I'm going through serious withdrawals. I find myself yelling to the heavens,How am I supposed to handle such conditions? This is 2010 for God's sake!

It doesn't matter that the "inferior" loaner phone receives incoming calls just fine; I can even make an outgoing call. But, that's not the point. I need those things. They're important.

I'm a middle school teacher, English and Social Studies. One of my students realized today that we spend a lot of time "talking about dead people". (I'm trying not to dwell too deeply on the fact that it's the second week of June and this epiphany is just striking her now. But, I digress.)

We just finished studying three major ancient cultures, the Maya, Aztecs and Incas. Amazing people really. Did you know the Incas invented popcorn? Or that the Maya developed a calendar measuring a solar year as 365.2420 days? How did they compute that? Not with the calculator function of a smartphone. No, they used the slightly less expensive, forked stick.

Technology is full of convenience and some really cool toys. As I've discovered this week, those bells and whistles are addicting. Yet, the calendar that will be on my new BlackBerry is largely based on the calculations of a stick in the hands of ingenious Maya villager. I can eat Incan popcorn while watching a movie in 3D, if I can ever find the time.

As I'm about to head home, with prayers that my BlackBerry just might've arrived early bouncing through my skull, I can't help but wonder what will happen when someone is studying us. Have we really created anything that people 1,500 years in the future will marvel at? And if we have, what are the odds it's not what we think it will be?

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