I can’t help but have a nagging feeling that we are losing the war. All around us the advance of technology seems to be surpassing our own human capacity to process. But that isn’t all that is happening. That capacity isn’t just stationary and being surpassed; it seems to be declining. I am afraid we have to face the ugly truth, my friends. As our phones get smarter, we are becoming more stupid.
Or stupider. I am not sure. I’d better Google it.
This fact became blatantly apparent recently when two gentlemen (and I use that term loosely), got into a brawl and one of them was stabbed over a topic with which they discovered they disagree. That topic? Well that would be the age old question of which smartphone operating system was superior; Android or Apple.
What a silly thing to argue over. Everyone know it’s Apple. (Sorry, I am typing this on an iPad, and that sentence just mysteriously appeared for some reason)
Anyhoo, …..
It seems a drunken argument over whether Android or Apple smartphones were superior turned violent early in the morning a couple weeks ago when “two Oklahoma roommates began assaulting each other during the bloody telecommunications debate.” They were apparently outside their apartment around 1 AM when their phone quarrel escalated to a new topic, that of who had a better sharp weapon.
As they wrestled in a parking lot, one of them struck the other in the back of the head with a beer bottle. The bottle apparently broke,and it was used to stab and slash the man as well. When cops arrived, they found him “covered in blood” with “several lacerations on his body from the fight”.
Maybe these Oklahoma roommates should’ve “opted out” of the fight. It is all the rage there, after all.
It was while both men were being treated for cuts and bruises at a local hospital that police learned that the pair had been “arguing about which phone was better, the iPhone or the Android.” The man who wielded the beer bottle was booked into county jail for felony assault with a deadly weapon. He is being held without bond, where jail records indicate a hold has been placed on him for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
I wonder if he was allowed one phone call – and if it was on an Apple or Android phone.
Of course, felonious assaults aren’t the only result of the continued technology driven degradation of the human intellect. Many more examples abound. One must only drive down the interstate and see a young mother, driving with two children strapped in the backseat while busily typing the latest lowdown (Gen Something parlance for gossip) about that “bitch” in Zumba into her steering wheel embedded smartphone, to see that this trend to idiocy is spreading.
There were early warning signs to this problem as long ago as the 1980’s. Once cash registers that could determine the change due a customer were introduced it only took about 5 seconds for young fast food workers to completely lose the ability to count change. Even today I occasionally enjoy handing a cashier an extra dime or 3 pennies after the change due has been tabulated just to watch the blank expression on their face. I do not do it often, mostly because my food tends to get cold while three supervisors and a manager call the corporate office trying to figure out what to do.
Yeah, those guys are absolutely worth $15 an hour.
The real tragedy in this tale is that the police in Oklahoma did not reveal who in this duel supported which phone, so the dogged challenge remains for us unanswered. I was hoping they would tell us, so we would know once and for all which phone platform was superior. If we could only get a definitive answer to that pressing problem we could move on to more important things, like “Is Bruce Jenner still a dude” or “this a-hole gave me an extra nickel after the register already told me what to do, how do I handle it?”
Yes, folks, there is little doubt that smarter phones and technology are dulling the intellectual senses of mankind.
And as for the earlier conundrum regarding the grammatically correct way to say someone is a bigger dumbass than they used to be, I Googled it. Turns out there is a stupid page for just that very question. It seems that “more stupid” is preferred, but “stupider” would also be grammatically correct.
That is the most stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.