About Once a Summer

It seems that there are a lot of life lessons that we all have to re-learn. Okay, maybe it is just me but it seems like every summer I have to re-learn that Johnsongrass is a favorite hangout for chiggers. About once a summer I have to get that sunburn. Those things are painful or itchy or inconvenient however, the one that gets me the most actually costs money. You see friends and neighbors, about once every summer I have to ruin a cell phone. I guess as technology has advanced and phones have become smaller, it has gotten easier and easier to put them in your pocket and to forget they are there. Who would leave the house without one these days? I know I sure don’t because we or at least I have become so dependent on that constant connection that, yes I’ll admit it, I freak out a little if I cannot immediately put my hand on my phone. I’m pretty sure it is a sickness and that I need medication but I bet I’m not the only one out there.

I remember my first cell phone was a bag phone. It was analog, actually got pretty good reception and I sure didn’t drop it in the water because it stayed in my pickup plugged in. As we moved away from the bag phone and into the more mobile devices that were about half the size of a brick, we sure thought we were high-tech. Some of them could store up to 99 phone numbers! Who in their right mind would ever need that many phone numbers saved? We couldn’t text, we couldn’t e-mail, all we could do was talk. We weren’t far enough along for that phone to become small enough to fit in shirt pockets. Oh, we had every variety of holsters. In fact, a lot of my cowboy friends along with myself would have some leather craftsmen make us one with our brand in it to incorporate the new technology with the Old West. Everyone knows when that thing rings, you have to clear leather and fire. We still couldn’t text or e-mail but as we progressed, the phones got smaller and more complex, that is when my summer tradition began. I can remember one time feeding a bunch of cows in wet ground, dropping my phone in the middle of about 30 head of momma cows with their calves. That time I got lucky because with all those hooves (you do the math), none of them planted any in the middle of that phone. Of course, I had to have someone call my phone so I could find it. It is amazing how much you can do with a cow manure coated phone with a toothpick and q-tips as far as clean-up is concerned. That phone always smelled like feed lot after that but it didn’t bother me, it smelled like money.

Over the next several summers, I learned that phones would not bounce, could not float, were not waterproof, and as we progressed very rapidly in technology, that phone became evermore important to stay in contact with the world. It is amazing to me that from the days of the bag phone, we have come to the point where your personal computer is now in your hand. I actually spent all last week on the move and all the while proofing e-mails, sending and receiving auction ads, not to mention the occasional phone call. All that ended Saturday morning at about 9 a.m. as I reached into a 6-foot water trough to clean out some muck and just like if you had greased it, my phone shot out of that shirt pocket and into that water like a heat-seeking missile. I am not so sure communists do not put some kind of phone magnets in the bottom of every water trough that is ever built to try to get our cell phones. Ah heck, I guess it is still just my fault because I have to do it about once a summer and I am a slow learner and maybe one day they will build phones for guys like me but until then, I guess it’s a good thing we have insurance because when you have embraced technology like I have, the best way to cause yourself to hyperventilate is to totally submerge that technology in muddy water. I even ruined my Blackberry phone to the point where we could not get the numbers. Thank goodness my legislative assistant has it all saved on her computer because remember back to that phone I told you about that would hold 99 numbers? Well I kinda hate to admit this but last time I had a phone switched over, the phone tech kid at the handy dandy phone store, yeah that’s the one, the one with no express lane, told me that I had over 900 numbers in my phone. That shocked even me. As you might imagine, in my business, I probably have some numbers that do not need to be out there so I guess I’ll take my SIM card down to some eye doctor’s office and have them shoot it with a laser beam and blow it completely up so nobody will ever know all the top secret high-level double-naught spy government bidness that happens on my high-level handheld computer. No matter how high-tech we get, I can still trash one by dropping it in the water or having it in the pocket of my shorts while I launch the boat or just dropping it amongst some hungry cattle. I guess the only answer is going to be some kind of microchip implanted behind our ear because until we get to that point, I will probably do it once a summer.

If you would like to contact me while I am at the capitol, please do not hesitate to send an email to donarmes@house.gov or call me at 1-800-522-8502.

And here’s a little something to think about as you go down the road:

“Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology” –John Tudor