It seems like everywhere you look these days, people have those camera phones (this is especially disturbing if you’re looking in either the bathroom or the Amazon rain forest). And with camera phones, have come descending upon us like so many gibbering sky trout, those people everywhere who always seem to be taking pictures of stuff with them. All of which is by way of getting to my real query here, “why on Earth does anyone need a phone that’s also a camera?” Seriously, never have I been talking to someone on the phone and all of a sudden been all like, “Oh, crap, you have to see this thing that I’m seeing at this very moment! I’m at the mall! And there’s this thing! And you have to see it now!” And yet, to observe many Richmonders, that’s exactly what a lot of people seem to be doing. Now I like cameras as much as the next guy, but I also like carburetors, and I think they’d be a silly thing to put in a phone too. Really, what camera phones tell us is that we, as a people, have forgotten how to combine two things that have nothing to do with each other in a way that isn’t retarded. This being the case, I would be remiss in my civic duty to the world were I to do otherwise than try to see what kind of improvements can me made to this situation.
For instance, how about a phone that was also a toaster? For while I’ve never been out talking on the phone to someone and suddenly succumbed to the urge to send them a picture of the Kinko’s at which I happen to be standing, I frequently will be talking to someone and all of a sudden want some fresh toast. I can never have any though, because while I routinely go gadding about with large quantities of sliced bread in my pockets, I never have a way of toasting it. And of course, this is just me; think about how many other people out there are going toastless because of poor phone design.
And of course, there’s always the spatula phone, because a lot of the time when I’m talking to someone, I find I’m in a situation where I need to flip a piece of bacon and/or a pancake over to avoid the tragedy of uneven flapjack cookage. With a spatula phone though, neither I nor any other unfortunate soul would ever again need live in fear of such disaster. But a spatula is never just a spatula, you know. You could also use it as a pie server, roadkill remover, spackle applicator, or garden trowel. Yea, the blandishments of the might spatula phone are many, and indeed if there is one good argument against them, it is only that too many weak-willed people would begin to spend all their waking hours finding things that needs to be spatulated while they talked to their friends.
Which brings us, of course, to the punch you in the face phone, because the truth is, there are a lot of people out in the world with cell phones who need to be punched in the face. Now, I’ve always done my best to make sure that no deserving cell phone abuser goes unpunched in the face, but I’m just one man, and what with the global domination and whatnot, I can’t be out punching faces all day anyhow. The punch you in the face phone, however, would save all of us a great deal of trouble by punching people in the face who were engaging in any of your more common mortal phone sins, such as: being way the hell too loud, divulging personal information that I truly neither wanted or needed to know about, just being a tool. The phone, you see, could automatically sense this, and punch them in the face at appropriate intervals, thus improving the quality of our public life and discourse immeasurably.
And let’s not forget the oft-overlooked chainsaw phone. Honestly, I can’t say how many times I’ve been talking on the phone and all of a sudden found it necessary to hew down the mightiest oak tree in the forest (And since I work in a forest, there’s a lot of them to hew down, though technically only one can be the mightiest. Though I guess that after I hew that one down, the one that was the second-mightiest takes over, and then I still have to hew it down too. And so on and so on.). Clearly much time and effort would be saved by designed a phone that was also a chainsaw, though you might want to set it up so that you couldn’t use both functions as once, lest the Van Gogh look make a sudden comeback amongst our nation’s lumberjacks and youth.
And for the modern man on the go, how about the U.S.S Ronald Reagan nuclear aircraft carrier phone. Come on now, we’ve all been in the situation before where we were just talking on the phone and all of a sudden we realized that we needed to project American military supremacy across the globe. Though even with a chainsaw or spatula phone would have trouble addressing this problem successfully, a phone that was also the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan would easily keep any international terrorists you happened to meet at a safe distance. Sure it would be a little more cumbersome, having as it would carry some 80 combat aircraft and be capable of top speeds of up to 30 knots. And of course being powered by two nuclear reactors, you’d be looking at up to 20 years of battery life before you even needed to plug it in for a recharge.
So yeah, take that camera phones, you’re not that cool at all, and when I rule the world with a delightful mixture of ruthlessness and self-effacing charm, you’re going straight out the door along with communism and soyburgers.
