We were having dinner over at our friends’ house, it having been entirely too long since we’d seen Sibyl and Tyler and had a chance to sit down and catch up, and so they fed us pork chops and sweet potatoes and a whole bottle of wine. Before the wine there had been beer, and after the wine there was good sipping whiskey, and mixed drinks with double shots of rum, and so good and liquored up as we all were it seemed only inevitable that what we should do would be to whip out our smart phones and start talking about them.
“Do you like your Droid?” I asked, trying so hard to focus on the icons on the screen of my own iPhone.
“It’s pretty sweet,” Sibyl admitted, and she showed me some of the apps she’d downloaded recently. “I’ve never had a smart phone before, but I’m loving this Droid.”
“Do you have Bump?” I said, excited. “Check it: it’s an app that let’s you transfer contacts and photos from phone to phone, and it runs on the Android platform too so if you had it we could bump phones to send things directly to each other.”
“Okay, wait a minute,” she said, searching for the app in the Android marketplace. “Okay, I got it. Okay, now what?”
“Sweet!” I’ve had this app on my phone for months but hadn’t had anyone to bump with. “Okay, I’m going to send you a photo,” I said, randomly selecting one from my camera roll. “Oh my god, this is going to be awesome.”
“So what do we do?”
“Just have the app running on your phone and then we’ll bump fists with them and it’ll jump over to your phone,” and of course this is just the effect, really the motion triggers the accelerometer which has the app check with the Bump servers to see which other phone is nearby doing the same thing and swaps the data for you, but in my excitement and inebriation that seemed a bit much, so I just said the above and then, “okay, now go! YEAH!”
And I punched Sibyl’s fist and knocked the phone clean out of her hand and onto the floor.
“Oh!” I said, and “oh shit!”, and “wow! I really didn’t mean to do that.” I think Tyler chuckled; I’m fairly certain Sarah said, “Honey, what did you do now?” Sibyl, like the champ that she is, picked up her phone, and fortunately we’d had enough rum and wine that the whole thing seemed pretty funny so she laughed and said, “okay, let’s try this again.” I agreed, but when she saw me winding up for a second kung fu phone strike she said, “Let’s not actually bump fists this time; I think we can just make the motion in the air and it should work, right?”
Sensible. “Yeah, that makes sense.” So our hands shot out again, trying to trigger the app and get the photo transfer to work. Our arms shot by each other, and again, and a third time while we tried to get it to work, which I am sure looked like some of the weakest fake karate fighting of all time as we air-punched at each other with cell phones gripped in our hands. Finally: “My phone buzzed. I think it worked! Did you get it?”
“Yeah, did you send me a photo?”
“I did! AWESOME.” And I sat there, feeling a little giddy, but something else too, something I couldn’t quite name…
And then Tyler put his finger on it exactly when he said, “That may have been one of the dorkiest things I’ve seen in a while.”
Oh yeah! That was it. Dorky. EXTREMELY dorky. Hey, I am what I am, and I don’t have a problem with that. Happily, my friends don’t either, because they invited us back.
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