Technology: The Aftermath

Oh Technology... Wonderful, wonderful technology, where would we be without you? Honestly, what would we do with ourselves if we were not able to update our Facebook status' 3 times while having dinner at a restaurant? How else would all of our friends and family find out about the over-priced meal, our attractive yet mildly incompetent server and our calorie-rific slice of chocolate whatever for dessert?
What would we do if the world at large couldn't tweet about the things that annoy it - all day, ever day? What if nobody knew what book Alyssa Milano is reading or what Oprah Winfrey had for breakfast? What the hell would we do?!

Do you remember the days before all of these new wonderful technological advances? Do you remember when you didn't have a cell phone? Back in the days when, if somebody wanted to reach you and you weren't home, they just had to wait. And, most importantly, if you were out on a pisser and had a sudden urge to drunk-dial your ex (or the CFO of your former company, which I did once), you couldn't just pull a hunk of circuits out of your pocket and make an ass of yourself. You actually had to leave your table, search for a pay phone, realize you didn't have exact change on you, and then make a mental note to call them when you got home at 2:47 in the morning. A mental note that, with any amount of good luck/good karma, would be erased from your internal memo pad by one of the three or four rounds of drinks that inevitably follow the urge to call said ex.

Now don't get me wrong - I love my smart phone. I love having the ability to text and email and Facebook update and Google search all in the palm of my hand. I love my smart phone and would be lost without it - literally, since I use my navigation app ALL THE TIME.

The reason I'm bringing this up now is because lately I have been having a tendency to text people in the middle of the night, in my sleep. Apparently it's a really easy thing to do, especially with the text-to-speech feature that is available on almost every phone these days. Sometimes the texts are coherent things like, "Hey, how are you doing today?" But mostly I seem to be texting what I'm saying in my dreams.
(It turns out smart phone + people who talk in their sleep = crazy motherf**king texts at wildly inappropriate hours.)
Now I know what you're going to say... "But Micah, the obvious solution is to not keep your phone next to your bed when you're asleep", and you know what? It's the truth. But after having family/loved ones out of town and only having a cell phone for the longest time, I trained myself to always keep my cell nearby in case of late night 'there's been an accident' calls. Plus I like being able to pick up my phone and check the time when it's several hours past my bed time and I haven't fallen asleep yet. Another solution would be to put in a passcode on my phone so that I had to enter a pin or draw a pattern to be able to unlock the phone, but I've tried that in the past and unless I'm going to keep it pass-coded all the time (which is a huge pain in the ass when I just want to check the time while I'm at the store), it's no good. In all likelihood I would set a code before bed that I wouldn't be able to remember in the morning, then I'll find out which is more embarrassing: texting random obscurities to people in my sleep or being locked out of my own phone. And after 25 years of hearing the Polish joke about the man who locked his keys in the car (it took him 30 minutes to get his family out), I think it would be the latter.

So be warned, world... If you are a person whose contact information I have saved in my phone, there is a reasonible possibility that I will text you in my sleep at some point in our pre-apocolyptic time on this rock.