ppppppppppsmileyfacepppppppptonguefacepppppp…

 
My son continued my “Generation Text” edumacation today. If you just came in, he explained earlier this week that his contemporaries think he’s a weirdo because his phone folds in the middle and he talks into it.

-A fellow in my blog comments says he just turns his iPhone on with a simple swipe. Easy peasy.
-Yeah, just don’t get it wrong or your phone puts you in Time Out.
-What does that mean?
– If your phone doesn’t like the way you swipe your fingers, or if you’ve forgotten what you’re supposed to do exactly, the phone refuses to talk to you.
-You’re making that up. That sounds like kindergarten.
– No, dad. Really. The phone locks you out with a big sign that tells you when you’ll be allowed to use it again.
– There is no way that’s true.
– Google it, dad.
– Hmmm. “iPhone is disabled.” Thirty-three million, five-hundred thousand results. Dear God.
– That’s not the good part.
– There’s a “good” part?
– Depending on how mad you make the phone by stabbing your fingers at it in some way it doesn’t like, the longer it locks you out. It tells you in big letters on the screen how bad you’ve been.
-There is no way this can be true. What adult would ever consent to that?
– My friends are not adults, dad.
– My bad.
-Go ahead, Google it.
-Hmm. Image search this time. Oh, dear savior. “iPhone is disabled. Try again in 520410 minutes.“Holy merde! That’s … (lots of arithmetic later) … like a year. A year!
-Dad, you left out a zero. It’s 5200410 minutes.
-Ten ****ing years?
– My ears are not a toilet, dad.
– Sorry, Moss. You must be able to reset the thing.
– You can, but it erases everything in the phone.
– How… therapeutic. But your friends must do something insane to the phones to do that.
– The phones do what they want, dad.
– Yeah, sure.
– No, really. They do all sorts of things by themselves.
– Honestly. The dog ate my homework isn’t good enough anymore? The phone did it! Please.
– Dad, we were in McDonald’s and one of my friend’s phones started vibrating in his pocket so he put it on the table and said, “Watch this,” and the screen slowly filled up with: pppppppppppppppp, then added some smiley faces, then went back to all pppppppp with tongue faces mixed in, then texted it all to the kid’s dad. He thinks he got a drop of water or something on the phone once.
– If I was his dad and got two of those in a row, I imagine I’d smash your friend’s phone with a hammer a bit. Nothing serious, just with all my might.
– It only sent one text. After the pppppppp-smiley face thing, the phone went to Wikipedia by itself and looked up “Fairy Tales,” and then “Fairy Tales, disambiguation…”
– And it did all this with no one touching it?
– Yeah, it was lying in the middle of the table while we all watched it, laughing like hyenas. Although he turned it off when it started in on “Germanic Fairy Tales.”
– Too –ahem –Grimm?
– You’re funny dad. Not funny haha, though.