By Dave Ellis

I have a very short attention span. At my last testing I was rated at ‘kitten in a knitting store’ level. Not too bad; it’s above ‘goldfish,’ but less than ‘male helping to plan a wedding.’ There’s no way this could be my fault (that requires responsibility), so I think I’ll blame my smartphone.

I figure everyone knows what a smartphone is, but then again I assume too much. Just like I assumed that everyone knows the ‘got your nose’ game…but guess what? They don’t! So wish me luck on the lawsuit. I hope my nephew and I can reach an amicable agreement.

A smartphone is a modern offspring of the brick phone of the 1980s. These old phones were large and cumbersome, but at least they had limited coverage. And you had to power them with a briefcase battery. That’s right, a battery that was the size of a briefcase. Keep in mind we had astronauts on the moon twenty years earlier. But as time moved on, the phone slimmed down (unlike me) and gained new features (like me, hair on my back) and eventually could fit in your pockets sans briefcase.

Then a revolution happened. One day someone said, “Hey! Why am I calling people and talking to them like we’ve been doing successfully for over a hundred years? Couldn’t I just type frustratingly on a miniscule keyboard using three letters per key?” Thus texting became popular, but the people cried out for more. They needed a way to send grainy, small pictures of their cats to each other. So the market answered them with camera phones, but that still wasn’t enough.

We needed a way to search the Internet for unimportant facts and figures while driving. Thus the smartphone was born. It behaves like an old fashioned phone, if you can find the phone app, but it does so much more. We are able to communicate like never before! When I get home from work I can instantly find out what my kids did that day without having to go upstairs! I can check their posts, feeds, tweets, ruminations, hog callings, and ‘Marco Polos!’ all from the comfort of my library (bathroom).
OK, I might be messing up the lingo, but you get my point. I am the world’s greatest dad, remotely.

The above is only partially true. We are a modern family and my kids love tech, but I do talk to them. I do have a lot of competition between all the social media sites, so I find it best to wear loud colors and gesture sporadically with my limbs. I also can vocally duplicate most of their notification sounds, so there is some trickery involved.

I’m not the smartest dad around, though. I have the world at my fingertips with my little smartphone, but alas I feel dumb. Like I said, my attention span is totally—oh! A puppy! But I’m working on it. Currently I find it difficult to read an article that goes past the bottom of my screen. Let’s see, is this article really interesting enough to warrant a flick of my thumb?
That’s my filter nowadays. I know I should nip this in the bud before my attention span hits ‘goldfish,’ but the smartphone’s got me.

Could I give it up? Maybe. But right now I panic if I don’t have it in my pocket. Could I go back to driving around without a computer in my pocket with access to the vast resource of all human knowledge? What if I heard a song and I needed the lyrics?
Or had to find out the temperature in London? These facts are important! If I didn’t know these things how would I sound smart in front of my family? I would have to go back to the days of dads guessing and making up facts and figures. That’s how my dad did it. So I will hold onto my smartphone, short attention span and all. I may not be able to focus, but at least I can tweet a hog call to my loved ones.

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