Cell Phone Raid in NYC

If you happen to be pulled over in New York City for using your cell phone while driving then you can expect a ticket and fine worth up to $120. It’s illegal to use your phone and drive at the same time in New York. NYPD hit the cell phone lottery to the tune of just over a million bucks for 24 hours worth of intense law enforcement by nailing over 9,000 offenders. You can check the whole story out over at the New York Post.

If you pull out your trusty made in China calculator, the city on average tickets 535 people per day for breaking the very same law. That works out to just about twenty-three million bucks a year in fines. I wonder what percentage that works out to be for the NYPD annual budget? Now I’m also wondering what happens to all the support people that follow Verizon subscribers around when they get pulled over? Do they scatter and hide at the first audible scream of “Cops”?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of banning cell phone use while driving. Far too often I’ve seen people forget that the main objective is steering their one to two ton bullet while talking on the phone, applying makeup, eating a meal to go and sipping a coffee. Driving a car is dangerous enough without any distractions even under the best of circumstances.

Papamoka

Text Message Idiot

I have to confess that I am a Text Message Idiot and that I suffer from TMI Syndrome. My children text me, my wife text’s me, my friends and family text me. They send me pictures, they send me videos, they send me all kinds of things that I could legally go to jail for in some foreign countries. Some of it is funny, some of it is cute, then some of it is just down right disgusting but I can’t figure out how to forward the damn things! Thus I am the classic TMI poster boy.

My fingers try to type out the messages back but the damn auto think logic in my cell phone turns my words into other words that don’t make sense. I try to re-write the text around the one word and it changes the letters around on another word. I then try to re-write that part and yet another word is turned into something that does not make any sense. By that time I am so frustrated that I just close up the cell phone, slam it down and just give up. I am however fluent in one word responses like OK, Yes, and LOL. Getting past that point… I’m screwed.

Then there is this whole other language in hieroglyphics or something out of ancient worlds that I can not comprehend. I did a Google Search and I found the beginning of the end of the English language as we know it and it is based in texting. Damn you to hell texters! Net Lingo has the conspiracy and encryption decoded and now we that can not text have these infidels code of speak so to speak. Then again… I’m still screwed.

Don’t even think that I don’t know about that three button typing for each key thingamajig! Hit the button once for A, twice for B, and three times for C and so the list goes on for the alphabet. You don’t want to know how many times I came close to just tossing the phone out of the window or front door of my house. Damn you to hell evil technology! This so called cell phone texting technology was not built for someone with a nervous system disorder prone to shakes having to type using limited options and buttons so small that trying to hit one key ends up hitting three others in the process.

Do cell phones and texting scare me? Oh, you don’t want to even go there. I’m the man that screams at the ATM machine when it asks me if I want to conduct my transaction in English as soon as I put my card in the damn machine. Then the damn machine has the audacity to ask me if I want a receipt for my transaction. I get a receipt when I put my money into the bank so why the hell are they asking me if I want one when I take it out of the bank? What part of idiocy did I catch and why am I nearly disabled with it? Maybe my personal DNA does not have the electronic acceptance gene marker that can skip a generation. My kids don’t have it and that is a fact. My thirteen year old hooked up a VCR and DVD to a television that I thought should never be able to accept either but she found a way to hook them both up? She must have gotten that gene from her mothers side of the family. I still can’t figure out the remote for our damn cable box and most of the time it does not matter because the six year old has it! Thankfully, I have my six year old that also has the electronic technology gene and she is more than happy to help her Daddy find the television she likes to watch.

I don’t want to call back the people that sent me a simple text because they have moved on past the moment. It was funny, interesting or even irrelevant to real life when they sent it to me. The first few times that I called the wife back on some funny text she had sent me, she yelled at me for not just texting her back. She didn’t have time to take my call? So why the hell did she text me in the first place then? I think you can guess who has won this war. Ergo, my text usage on our cell phone plan is nearly nothing. Everyone that knows me, knows that I am a Text Messaging Idiot. TMI is not something to laugh at. This is the illiteracy of the new century. Some day you will not be able to buy a loaf of bread or even a cup of coffee without being able to text someone what you want. Ozzy Osbourne is good but what about the rest of us suffering with TMI?

I’m thinking about starting a text messaging idiot hotline where texting is not allowed. You have to pick up the phone and actually call and talk to someone. I don’t think we will need to hold meetings or anything because most of us are still having a hard time trying to find the damn redial option on our cell phones to find out where the meetings will be held. If we do decide to hold TMI meetings, look for a large pile of cell phones on the sidewalk and the nearest late night breakfast diner.

Now I have to ask the hardest question for our readers ever. Are you too a text messaging idiot? Do you suffer from little button disorder? I’m asking because I honestly think the drug companies in America could come up with a fix for this. It might take a couple of billion dollars in research but would you pay for a little blue pill that would allow you to text message?

Papamoka