Oh brother…

Well, we won’t ever be accused of being “too smart for the room”…

Yesterday afternoon, we picked up a new cell phone for Mrs. That Dan Guy, so that we can text each other once we depart on the “Getting It Out Of Our System” tour in a few days. More on that soon. Today’s post will focus on how aged people should not be allowed to handle new technologies – or at least us people, perhaps.

So, the phone is pretty slick, and all we really needed it to do was text back and forth, something even a three-year-old can figure out how to do these days. However, when I tested texting her from my Blackberry, all she received were dotted lines – no readable text whatsoever. Rather than try to change settings, we just kept sending test messages back and forth, hoping it would resolve itself. What’s that old definition of insanity? Continue doing the same thing, expecting different results?

Well, after a couple of fruitless hours hoping this different result might appear, we went back to the mall where we bought the damn thing. And consequently puzzled the staff there – who had never seen anything like it before. They could all text her just fine – my phone (the one that mattered) could not. It was like mine sent out morse code, without the dots. I like using those dashes when I write, but this was downright ridiculous.

So, we had to rush off to meet friends for dinner, which we did. After bringing up this subject with them, they tried texting her – and those all went swimmingly. Mine, still not so much. One suggested maybe it was a language setting, which I checked out, and discovered that there was indeed some foreign language set as my default – changing it to English resulted in a successful message sent and received.

Text messaging, made simple – in under six hours, and with only 6 people helping to resolve the problem.

Next up, I explore quantum physics – that shouldn’t be as hard for us to master.

Chow for now!