Dining Out in the Age of the Coronavirus

Dining out seems to be one of the things lost in this year-that-wasn't, thanks to the coronavirus, but I've made do by turning my front porch into a dining area.  A friend frequently comes over since she lives in an apartment in the city and doesn't have access to any outdoor seating by her unit and we sit at the Little Tykes table I've set up on my porch along with two plastic chairs.

We sit six feet away from each other, take off our masks and eat the fare we've carried out from nearby restaurants, pizza--bagels--frothy cold soup concocted like a smoothie.  We throw bread pieces into the yard and draw birds in to gobble up the dough balls for our amusement.

My friend has downloaded an app (Merlin) on her phone that tells us what the bird likely is when she uploads a picture of it--the app has identified house sparrows, northern mockingbirds, cardinals and bluejays.  The last two we didn't need help identifying.

I sit in the same dining area twice a month and have a FaceTime lunch with a friend and former colleague from work--he lives in Florida currently--and eat egg salad sandwiches I make and drink a beer or two as we recount out twenty-five years of work together.  We haven't forgotten a single one of those good times in the past.

Peter calling for Peter...

My iPhone called me. I was sitting at my dining room table when my cell phone, nearby but untouched by me for an hour, suddenly rang and announced that I was calling me, and showed me my own photo for confirmation. 

I answered this anomaly and said, "Hello?" On the other end was a recording from the Microsoft Security Department telling me that my account had been compromised and I would lose my services within 48 hours unless I reset my settings, which they would help me with.

I hung up. How did my phone call itself? 

An hour later the same cell phone, untouched since Peter called Peter, suddenly binged and when I looked at it, a text was scrolling on its black face starting with "HEY". I picked the phone up and Siri said, "I'm sorry but I didn't hear that," and came alive with her familiar clucking noises and swirling colors at the top as she waits for a further command or query.

I held my phone still until Siri went dark and silent, then checked my messages. No message had come in and I couldn't find the "Hey" script again. 

I got paranoid and wrapped my phone in a towel so it (or somebody) couldn't see what I was doing through my camera, and hopefully whatever it could hear going on in my house would be muffled. 

I wondered if the infernal being could see through cloth, and speculated that it could probably hear as good as HAL did in 2001 (Hal tried to kill Dave, remember). I googled "possessed phones" and the stories there were many and hair-raising. 

So my question is this. Should I take a hammer to my phone or my phone to a priest?

It was hard but we got 'er done...

I was just getting into my first run on a cold windy day in two years, finally more or less having my ragged breathing under control after six months of doggedly running three times a week as I came back from injuries and a lot of pounds gained, as the cold wind blew into my face and the sun sank low in the west at 4:30 pm when it caught my eye in the roadway.  A little black object, the size of a slender pack of cigarettes, there on the blacktop four feet from the curb, a cellphone.  It looked like it was smashed up, discarded, a mere husk of itself, left behind for dead there in the street.

Nobody was in sight.  I stopped to pick it up.  Although it was all scratched up, it was alive all right, and the screen came to life as I handled it, a Samsung Galaxy.  I pushed at it, poked it, prodded it, wondering how I could get it back to its owner.  The problem was that it was all locked up tight, when I pushed the little phone icon, to maybe see its "recent calls" page so I could dial someone who had called it to start the process of finding out its owner so I could have someone contact the family it belonged to with the news that their beloved precious one had been found alive, undoubtedly to the great joy of the household.  I felt like it would be as if I was delivering good news to the family after a risky operation or maybe returning a lost child to his or her house after having the small child recite the proper address to me by rote.  In my year and a half of owning an I-phone, even though I tap maybe two percent of its actual power, I have come to understand how integral these infernal little machines have become to everyday ordinary life; this palm-sized pilot has more power than the NASA computers that sent a man to the moon and without it you can't find an address (read a map--what's that?) or reach out to someone through text (call them?--they'd never answer their phone anyway) or know when it's time to arise from bed (watch?--just pull out your cellphone and look at it).

The important little device produced a password page and after a few seconds shut down again and blacked out.  No way to make a call (or send a text) on this thing except for an "Emergency Call."  I briefly considered pushing that button and dialing 9-11 on it,  but I thought that would be a ridiculous use of community safeguarding--would you send a squad car here please, I've just found a small inert mass of plastic and metal in the gutter and it must get back to its owner right away.  Like returning the stray dog to its distraught owner or a lost little child to his or her hysterical parent.  Nope, that wouldn't do, besides the dispatcher would have no way of knowing who the owner was or would hardly care, (I'm sorry sir, I understand that you have found a thousand dollar bill in the street but that is not a police matter unless it was somehow associated with a crime); I'd have to find a new way to get this forlorn "It's my life" piece of scrap metal back to its desperate owner.

I thought maybe I should take it to the nearby UbreakIfix franchise store and ask them to break the phone's code and break into it--for free of course as a public service, or leave it with them, but I doubt Samsung issues a booklet entitled How To Hack Into An Android In Five Seconds and why would someone who lost a phone go to the nearest technology store to find it.

Maybe I should stand there in the street till dark holding it aloft until its frantic owner and his or her posse came by, backtracking their route home from school, to find the devious, silent device, calling it every five seconds to bring it alive with light and noise until they found it to great joy and celebration.  There it is!  Drinks are on me!

Given where and when I found this devil's tool, I thought, putting on my long-ago policeman's cap, that it likely belonged to a school child returning home after home from a school bus stop there at the intersection.  The unmarked  stop was, I knew from having lived in this neighborhood for three decades, right there at this T-intersection a block from my house.  Having found the Sammy twenty feet down the street running away from the longer through street, I reasoned that it was probable that the possible direction of where the house of the owner was down the shorter street.

The increasing range of possibilities of what I could do with this fist-sized, locked-up library of information were starting to occur to me with dizzying speed--leave a note on the street sign pole--canvass the immediate street by knocking on doors, come back every half hour to look for the search party, come back at 8 am on Monday to ask the assembled group of departing children and hovering helicopter parents at he bus stop if any of them had spent a sleepless weekend without their lifeline to civilization, and they could have it back if they could describe the talisman which currently resided in my pocket, take it to the police station downtown.

The thought intruded into my brain that as nice as it would be to get this thing back to its owner, I actually didn't want to spend an inordinate amount of my time on this--I have a life actually, even though I am old, live alone, am retired and only speak to the same three or four people every other day or so that I call regularly and speak to for a few minutes on my cellphone; my sister, my former running buddy who moved away to Arizona with his twenty-something wife, my former girlfriend who is still my best friend and occasionally, a former BFF from eighth grade who returned to my life a few years back through the magic of Facebook (he also lives alone and also has a totally estranged child through the diabolicalness of PAS and the crucifying cruelty of Western divorce) and a former colleague from my litigation days who joins me once a month for lunch.  These are people who actually answer their cellphones when it rings.  Oh, and also my house full of books waiting to be read and the Washington Post in the driveway very morning at 5 am.

Then a pernicious thought entered my my mind--leave it there!  I was afraid it would get run over by a car or ruined by a rainstorm if I did that, but anyone searching for it would likely backtrack their recent steps and they might find it that way.  But then again, it would be dark soon and the slumbering ambient being might not survive the night.  Why get involved!  Pull a Kitty Genovese on this no-good Good Samaritan urge.  No good deed goes unpunished!  Oh yes, I learned that in my quarter million dollar divorce.  And after all, parents don't look kindly upon old men approaching and speaking to unknown school-age children, and nobody these days in armed America wants a stranger knocking on their door!

Plus, now it was interfering with my run.  But to leave a tiny but fully loaded, expensive machine unattended by the side of the road in my neighborhood didn't seem right.  Still, maybe someone would think I was stealing it.  I thought about mens rea.  Even though, everyone knows a locked cellphone is useless without the password.  But if you were of a mind, and got it unlocked, it would be useful indeed, your very own throwaway phone--at least until the actual owner changed his or her chip or number or stopped paying the bill.

All sorts of thoughts crowd your head during a run if you don't distract yourself with piped in music via headphones, eh?  Leave it!

I started off again to finish my run, carrying the little box.  It felt comfortable in my hand, actually, as for years I ran with a camera in my hand to record sights I saw along the way, especially in downtown DC, protestors, monuments, dramatic skies, portraits snapped by cooperating tourists or selfies recording that particular run like a traveling journal.  First the cameras were small disposable film cameras which I shipped off to get developed every month (and actually got printed pictures back) and then in 2013 I graduated to a digital palm-sized sports camera (much cheaper--no development costs and instant gratification).  But then last year I finally got a smart phone, costing well-nigh a thousand dollars, and it's loaded with all sorts of personal information, addresses, phone numbers and two years worth of pictures so I don't take it on runs (it's too valuable to risk losing or damaging) so with the march of technology, life takes a step forward and a step backward, as I no longer run with either a camera or a phone (I had a rugged flip phone I carried in a fanny pack).

I encountered a boy walking a dog and asked him if he recognized the phone as his or a friend's.  No luck there.  I stopped by a car pulling out of a driveway in the 'hood and asked the lady driving it if she recognized the phone, perhaps belonging to a schoolchild on the street.  No luck there.  I asked an elderly couple walking down the street the same thing, then two boys playing soccer in a front yard the same thing.  No luck there, or there.  I gave up on this approach.

I actually canvassed the eight houses on the short block on which I found the phone, and at the three house at which someone answered the door, no one had any knowledge of the phone.  I started developing an uneasiness at walking up to front doors to knock, looking at the ferocious sign posted at one gate assuring me that I was on camera and there was no trespassing or loitering at or by those premises (I didn't enter that yard), wondering if there was a dog in the backyard in the gates I did transgress to walk up to the door to knock, and reflecting back one year to the house I knocked at in Fairfax county while canvassing for the democrats at which the drunken rube who answered told me to get off his property before he shot me and punched me in the shoulder to hasten my way.  Nope, that approach wasn't going to work anymore in modern America.

I took the magical unit home and set it on my dining room table, knowing that soon it would burst forth with life, with people seeking it, hunting it, looking for where this center of all life had gone to. And soon it was vibrating, bleeping and ringing as messages and texts and calls poured in, the calls every 5 minutes being from Roxy Mama with a Virginia number imposed upon the lighted up screen which, maddeningly, only lasted a second before the number disappeared, too quick for me to write down.  Texts I knew I couldn't answer or see because of the password problem (I briefly considered starting at 1-1-1-1 and trying to guess the password but I didn't to pass the magic number of tries and lock the owner out forever) but I thought maybe I could answer the phone when it rang, after all, for more than six decades, when a phone rings, any phone, I have just answered it.

But not this time.  It rang, displayed a green button which I assumed was Answer, and a smaller red button, which I assumed was Decline.  I poked at the green button but nothing happened, the phone kept ringing.  Poke, poke, stab, stab--ring, ring, ring, silence.  I spoke to the now dead phone, hoping someone was there.  "Hello?  Hello?  Hello!"  Nothing.  I handled both sides of this infernal Android, pushed, swiped and prodded its every surface but nothing.  The phone rang again and this time I poked the red button to no effect.  I used to have an android, which I hated, it was a cheap Chinese knock-off of a Samsung which AT&T sold to me as part of its cellular plan to me and I quickly discovered it was an indecipherable mass or maze of puzzling complexities that was a hundred percent more frustrating than usable, plus it somehow ate up my monthly data amount in mere days although I only went on the Internet on it once or twice.  I consigned it to my shelf for two more years and ent back to my dumb phone before I discovered, since I have a Mac computer, that I could actually navigate a little on my girlfriend's I-phone and I made the leap to the I-phone world, sort of.

Having discovered the evil Androids ways, the next time Roxy Mama rang I was prepared with paper and pencil, and I wrote down the number before it faded away after a mere second.  I tried calling that number on my cellphone but variously I got a written message on my screen that I wasn't set up for WiFi calling, a recorded "Not in Service" message, or nothing.  Once I got a voice mail box and left a message with my return number but nobody called me back.  I wondered if the number that flashed briefly on the screen when the phone rang was its number, but that would be stupid.  I was remembering how much I had hated my Android.

I tried to puzzle it out.  If my I-phone rang, I thought, anyone could answer the call without unlocking it by merely pushing the large red button on its lit screen.  Why would an Android be more difficult, to where you had to unlock it first?  I thought further that I had learned from my girlfriend, who is about my age (I have no children I can learned I-phone things from), that when you swipe your screen, sometimes things happen, things go away, they go to a deeper level, they this, they that, whatever.  The next time the phone rang, I would try something different.  It rang again, this time iy was Cruz Jr calling.  I judged the screen, and carefully swiped, to the right (lucky guess), the green button.  The phone went silent.  There was no speakerphone button I saw.  Was it dead again?  I put it to my ear.  "Hello?"

"Hello?" a voice answered back, very tiny.  Obviously I had turned the volume down very low when I was fooling with the side buttons trying to answer the phone calls earlier.  As a matter of fact, I had started worrying then that I might have been snapping pictures inside my house and considered briefly taping over the lease but I didn't want to alter the recovered phone in any way so I was scrupulously not pushing any extant buttons.

"Hello."

"Hello."    

Well, there was life here, and I definitely didn't want to lose this connection, so I took the bull by the horns.  "Hi, I am speaking on a phone I recovered in the street, do you know anything about it?"

"Oh, yes sir, it is my father's and we have been looking for it," came the polite reply.

"Well, I have it here in my house and I want to get it back to its owner."

"Where are you, sir?"

"Falls Church.  Where are you?"

"Woodbridge."

Woodbridge!  That's 40 miles away.  How could a schoolchild, my original premise, or his dad, have gotten 40 miles already since school let out and he was let out at the school bus stop up the street?

It turned out that the phone's owner is a construction worker at the major intersection construction going on two blocks from my house, causing great local disruption, and the workers all park in our neighborhood during the day because there's no parking anywhere else.  He lives in Woodbridge and had driven home after work only to discover that he had lost his phone when he was angrily confronted by his wife, Roxy Mama, who wanted to know why he hadn't answered any of her half-dozen calls wondering where he was.  She had been calling looking for him, not the phone.  I'm glad, actually, that I didn't figure out how to answer any of those calls so that I didn't have to explain to this apparent dynamo what I was doing with her husband's phone, which was in his safety vest and evidently dropped out onto the street when he tossed his vest into the back seat at the end of the day.

The two gentlemen, Cruz Sr and Cruz Jr, drove to my house to retrieve the phone as they didn't want Papa to be without a phone over the weekend.  The owner tried to press an amount of cash into my hand for getting his lost phonebook to him but I shook him off and told him to buy gas with it instead to allay his 80-mile round trip to get his phone.  The two men were very courteous and obviously grateful.  I was glad the phone was going to make its way safely home.

All in a day's run.

A New Phone

I activated my true smart phone, an android, last Thanksgiving after it sat on my shelf unused for two years.  I was happy all that time with my old dumb smartphone which had a slide-out tactile keyboard that was good for sending texts and made and received calls, so why swap it out for a complicated android after it arrived once I upgraded my service plan to receive for the same monthly rate unlimited call minutes, unlimited texting and the new phone.

I visited my sister for Thanksgiving and she forced me to activate the android, a THC which was already obsolete by then and no longer sold.  I hated it, couldn't figure it out, went on the internet only once (to look up an address) with it which apparently unleashed a horde of genies into my phone and thereupon it ran 24 hours a day, hogged data (16GBs every 10 days), sent me weird texts from entities I didn't know concerning phantom orders I'd made and rogue deliveries that were coming and I finally went to the Verizon store to change my phone and my service.

Unfortunately, it was staffed by three young people, all twenty-somethings who spoke in very heavily-accented English and I couldn't understand what they were saying whenever the discussion turned technical.  I told them the reason I was switching from AT&T was because it had hired the grifter lawyer Michael Cohen for $400,000 to provide access to our corrupt president, but not one of them knew who Michael Cohen was.

I asked them if they had ever heard of Robert Mueller but I drew three more blank stares.  They tried to upsell me on a "jump pack" and/or a "Hum" to "bundle" with the phone, useless accessories so much as I could even follow what they were talking about and I left the store with my old, hated phone still a part of my life and a troubling suspicion that this country is in deep trouble.

A life changing event

I switched my dumb phone over to a smart phone over the Thanksgiving holiday I spent in Columbus because my sister made me do it. I had been paying a few dollars a month for an HTC Android for a couple of years, along with a low-data plan, but the unit sat on my shelf unused because my dumb phone did everything I wanted in a portable communication device; it made and received calls, sent and received texts, directed me to call voicemail when messages were there and alerted me on its landing page of any calls I'd missed, with the phone number and time of occurrence noted, and any texts I'd received. Plus it fit into my pocket and it had a slide out keyboard.

The new phone, not so much. At least where I can find the stuff that I'd like to know about, like when I receive texts, of any missed calls, or about waiting voicemails. Plus my fingers are too fat to quickly type on the on-screen keyboard, and auto correct and/or auto fill are killers. "Courteous" is not spelled "curious" and they mean vastly different things in a sentence. 

Plus the new phone, being bigger and thinner, doesn't fit into my pocket anymore and if I slip it into my back pocket, like I see all the cool kids do, I fear it will slip out or I'll sit down forgetting it's there and break the thin instrument right in half.  So I carry it in my hand, when I have it on me at all, like all the self-absorbed people I see around me do, except that I don't hold it up to my face constantly and stare reverentially at it non-stop. 

When a call comes in, I don't usually answer it successfully.  Especially at 55 mph.  I hear the ring and see the green button alright, but I haven't figured out whether it's a swipe or a poke or a stab and hold on the greenie thing that starts the connection yet.  It seems to me that it has been all three things in the past the few times I have answered it in time, and whatever technique that worked the last time doesn't work the next time.  I think the device is sentient and trying to give me apoplexy.

The only thing it shows me when I poke the phone icon, in addition to the number keypad, is the last call I successfully had.  But if I touch that flag it immediately dials the number, not knowing that I want other information like when did I speak to that person and for how long.

Five days into using the new old smart phone, AT&T texted me that I had already used up my data for the month and they were billing me another $20 for another 300MB.  That was the plan they sold me two years ago, based upon what I said then my internet usage would probably be.  I didn't know how I even used up 300MB since I never went to the Internet on the stupid thing (I didn't know how, or desire to go to the Internet on it).  Knowing people told me that things were "running in the background" was how that happened. So I shut the phone off and kept it off to save my data. This was not progress. It drained dry every 18 or 20 hours anyway, whether I used it or not.

Frustrated, I went to the AT&T store and complained bitterly about the phone. The nice man there listened patiently, saw how old I was and didn't take my recriminatory statements personally, probably figured correctly that I didn't have any kids in the house (the real solution), and informed me that AT&T no longer sold my model phone or the plan I was on.

He put some things on my landing page that were useful, like a Google button and a Travel button for GPS, saying they probably should have spent a little more time with me at the AT&T store in Columbus when they swapped out my dumb phone for the two-year old model I had. 

I said, for instance, I hadn't received a voicemail in a month and how could that be? I didn't even know how to call my voicemail.  He took my phone, prodded a couple of times and handed it back to me with the first of many unlistened-to voicemails I had stored up playing.  I asked how he did that. He said to go to the phone's number pad and push and hold "1".  That connected me to voicemail and played any outstanding messages.  I asked how I was supposed to know that, and he just gently said that people had to tell you that, is all.

So now I have settled in to listen to 29 voicemails dating back to December 1st.  The ones older than that have probably been deleted.  I listened to 8 last night, oldest first and all way out of date, before I got bored and left the rest for today.  At least two were at least 3 minutes and they were excruciatingly long.  The two most interesting ones were the same but days apart, a computer-generated woman's voice informing me that my Microsoft Windows license had expired and I needed to call this 800-number immediately to get it restored.  Since I swore off Microsoft forever when they saddled me with the terrible Windows 8 system years ago when my old computer died, and I went to a Mac after junking the new computer with that Windows abomination on it, I don't know how my Microsoft Windows license "expired" but I'll sure call to rectify it right away!

The man at the 7-Corners AT&T store suggested that I change my plan to a 3GB plan, which I was going to do but when I called AT&T customer service they upsold me to an unlimited plan for "only $10 more."  The AT&T store man also suggested that I keep my obsolescent phone for now, because it was like a "trainer model" that I could practice on.  A wise man indeed; he didn't try to upsell me to a fancier phone that I can't use and don't need.

Oh, the adventures I'll have with this new/old phone.  I have heard from more than one person that possessing a smartphone is a "life changing" event, and the small implement "contains your life" in it. Forward!

Text

Slowly, my friends have gotten me to text.  It used to cost me 20c per text, which I let them know, so they all knew to call me instead.

That's the point.  If you want to communicate with another human being, especially a friend, speak to them.

I changed my phone service plan and got unlimited texts, and a Samsung phone, which I have parked on the shelf for the last six months because my dumb phone with its actual keyboard still works just fine and now I can receive and answer texts for free.  Well, it turns out it that texting is not as blessed as it seems to be to many people.

My Samsung might be the model which would burn my house down if I ever charged it which I haven't--did I say my dumb phone worked just fine?--and my new phone plan launched my new and better life, and I have been engaging in texts lately.  But it's not actual communication, rather, it's throwing snippets of information out there, sort of like hollering, such as "here" [I've arrived, where are you] or "2 min" [I am two minutes away by car and I am texting while driving and if I don't crash first I'll be there very shortly].

In a phone call, which used to be the norm, there's real communication because you can nail down all the details.  In answering a text, the recipient of your message, if you have included a query or queries in it, can ignore you or give you a partial answer to some but not all of your written content, and you're kept either waiting for that other person's response or hanging onto the partial, perhaps purposefully selective response until the event has come or has passed.

If it had been a phone call, either the connection wouldn't have been made in which case there are no plans laid so nobody is left hanging awaiting the other person's full response, or the call would have been completed and the information exchange would have been complete, including the nuances.  Except for very limited instances, like waking up at 3 am because of a storm outside and texting that you're not going to be at the agreed-to meeting place at 7 am for a run (because you can't call somebody in the middle of the night for that relatively unimportant information exchange and now you don't have to arise at 6:30 am to phone to say I won't be there), the exchange of full information is better done through actual talking.