Tam Harbert

Last week I bought my first smart phone – an iPhone 4. I had been holding out for years, using a prehistoric LG Electronics flip phone circa 2005, on a pre-paid Verizon plan of $15 a month, because I don’t make many mobile phone calls. Most of my work is done at my desk in my home office. And even if I am on the road, I prefer to use a landline for phone interviews because the sound quality on most cell phones is crummy.

What I finally realized, however, is that I didn’t need the smart phone for the phone part. I needed it for the “smart” part, the computer capabilities that it provides. When I’m on the road, or even across the street shopping for groceries, I need to be available to my clients. If someone sends me an urgent e-mail, I need to respond right away.

The single most important reason I finally took the plunge is that a smart phone is a good backup system when my power goes out. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I live on a weak part of the electricity grid and am the victim of frequent power outages of fairly long duration. Short of getting a generator, the next best solution was to upgrade my phone so that I could continue to access my e-mail and the Web even if my lights went out. Since this access was the primary force driving me to upgrade, I wanted the most reliable wireless carrier. When the iPhone finally came out on Verizon Wireless, I decided the time was right.

What I didn’t expect was how useful the iPhone would be in so many different ways. For example, it not only serves as my most reliable connection to e-mail and the Internet (assuming I keep it charged), but it also may become a key component of my computer backup system. By using the cloud and the phone, I can have access to just about any file I need even if my power goes out. By storing my files and notes online at Dropbox, which provides a basic amount of storage for free, I still have access to them even when the power goes out. Granted, I can’t exactly edit and write stories with my thumbs on the iPhone keyboard, but I can at least send a story to an editor if need be.

The phone also gives me a great way to save not only files but also story ideas. I get these ideas all the time, but if I don’t write them down (and I almost never do) I forget them quickly and usually permanently. Now I can use the iPhone’s voice recorder to take note of that great idea and what sparked it.

I also didn’t realize how useful this pocket computer would be in my daily life. Using the Notes app, I keep a running list of things I need to pick up, such as office supplies and groceries. Now as long as I have the phone with me I also have those lists available, so when I happen to stop at Staples or the local grocery store I’m not wracking my brain to try to remember that I needed an HP 901 printer cartridge or a package of Shiitake mushrooms.

My iPhone also serves as my brag book about my son. Rather than pulling a three-year-old school photo out of my wallet, I can show people the latest pictures of him on Facebook, as well as some of his latest performances (he’s an actor and singer) on YouTube.

And he, an iPhone user for years, has turned me on to Pandora, an app that lets you build personalized music channels and also recommends new music that its algorithm says might suit your taste. So now I’m broadening my musical horizons while on the treadmill at the gym.

After resisting mobile phone technology for years, I’m now hooked. And I haven’t even made a phone call.

Twy as I might, I can’t figure out what to do with Twitter.

I’m not exactly on the cutting edge of social media, but I do use Facebook, have my own website and blog, and pride myself on being an early and fairly sophisticated user of LinkedIn. I find all of these platforms useful – either professionally, personally or both. They each have their learning curves, but they aren’t so steep that they keep moderately intelligent people away.

Twitter, on the other hand, baffles me. Its content is neither relevant to my life nor useful in my work. The top Twitter trends last week – the NCAA and Justin Bieber – don’t interest me. Every time I see an article on how to use Twitter, I scan through it eagerly, hoping that I’ll find the key to make sense of this confusing world. So far, nada.

Typical tips for how newbies can get started on Twitter:

1. Share URLs. We’re already overwhelmed by stuff to read, see and hear on the Internet. Unless it’s really important, why would I want to add to that burden? And if it is really important, why would I rely on Twitter – where it will get lost in the great galaxy of tweets (except of course for those people who’ve mastered the Twitter universe and can filter out the critical news from the mundane I-just-spilled-coffee-on-my-keyboard drivel)? Having said that, I have tried to use Twitter to market myself. Each week, I dutifully tweet the URL of my blog post. Google Analytics tells me it draws very few readers. (It’ll be interesting to see the stats this post generates.)

2. Retweet information. If I don’t understand the usefulness of tweets, why would I want to retweet and just add to the cacophony?

3. Directly message friends and colleagues. I already can’t reach them by phone, e-mail, texting or IM. Now I have to add tweeting to that list of futile attempts? Sometimes I suspect it’s all a cosmic joke by the gods of the Internet, who laugh as we all run circles around each other online.

4. Search for friends and colleagues. See non-reason #3. Besides, when I try to search for people, I either come up with complete strangers (with similar names), I can’t tell which of the people listed are my friend/colleague (most don’t have photos), or I locate the right person but find they haven’t tweeted since 2009. (There’s a lot of us newbies who tweeted once or twice, then gave up.)

I’ve also tried some of the desktop clients, such as TweetDeck, which are supposed to make all those tweets manageable. I couldn’t figure out how to use them. It probably had to do with the fact that I didn’t even know what it was I was trying to manage . . .

So, why twouble myself? Give me a good reason – in 140 characters or less – why I should tweet.

Some days it seems like a neutron bomb has exploded across the country and I, sitting in the basement bunker that is my office, am the only person left. I reach out to the world, but get no response. My e-mails vanish into the ether. I don’t know whether they are being received or ignored. My voice mails start to sound a bit lonely and desperate, like a high school nerd trying to find a date. I call Comcast just to make sure the broadband connection is still up. Never reaching a real person (which is not unusual when you call Comcast) increases my paranoia.

There is no deep, dark conspiracy behind these days when no one is out there. They just happen, out of the blue, like when solar flares knock out satellite communications. I’m fairly sure that everyone has days like this, but since I work alone my overactive imagination can get the better of me. Maybe some horrid rumor is circulating and everyone – editors, sources, colleagues and friends – has decided to blackball me. Or I remember 9/11, when I was oblivious to what was happening in the world until my best friend e-mailed me one short, curt message: “Are you OK?”

I tune in to NPR just to make sure.

I roust my dog from his afternoon slumber, just to get a rise out of someone. Then I do the one thing that always guarantees an end to the silence: I take the rest of the day off. I used to be annoyed when I’d return to dozens of e-mail replies and returned phone calls, as if everyone had waited until they knew I was out of the office. But I’ve learned to chuckle at the cosmic joke. And be thankful that people still want to talk with me after all. And start again tomorrow.