The G Spot

Two days ago, Alexey (my son) and I saw a commercial for T-Mobile's new 4G phone. With it, you can watch movies, television shows from the Web, send texts, check email, and have a video chat with someone who also has a 4G phone and thus video chatting capabilities (not to mention being able to annoy the crap out of everybody else in the restaurant, coffee shop, airport, bus, or train with you, your phone, and your loud mouth)

Alexey proudly announced he was quite satisfied with his 3G iPhone.

In response, I had some questions and one apparently boring soliloquy:

#1- What does the "G" stand for? Does it mean gigabyte or generation? I've never been quite clear on the concept.

#2- (and here is where I think I lost Alexey)--what's with this video chat thing? I mean, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone so we didn't have to be standing next to each other to talk. But with his invention we did have to stand next to the telephone waiting--sometimes endlessly--in order to to talk to the person to whom we did not want stand next to. When we could no longer stand sitting by the telephone waiting to talk to the person we no longer had to stand next to, somebody invented a cell phone. And now the cell pones have video chatting so we can "virtually' stand next to the guy we don't physically have to stand next to in order to talk to him.

So my question is, if we've come to this, why not save the radiation exposure and just go find the guy and talk to him?? It's like the phones that do the voice-to-text thing where you can dictate a TEXT message. If you're going to all that trouble, just use the damn phone to CALL the person!

When I was 12 and out playing at Clay Neal's house, as it got dark, my mother would step out on to the screened porch, cup her hands over her mouth and yell my name across the half acre of woods that separated our houses until I answered. Today, my son sends me a text message when he's ready for me to pick him up from where ever he is.

For all this introspection and history, I got from Alexey a blank stare, a "Whatever," and a "Like I said...3G does everything I need."

So much for parenting.