The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012 1937 - 2012 · Celebrating 75 Years Orono Weekly Times - 5 From The House At The Centre Of The Universe Signs Of Spring! Elephant massages to purple in my Ohio Bob! by Tracy Tonkinson March 7, 1876 was a red letter day for the world, even if we didn't quite know it yet. Alexander Graham Bell, that sometime son of Scotland, adopted Canadian inventor and all round clever clogs, patented his fabulous invention; the telephone. On the day he registered his patent Bell didn't actually have a working model, but a couple of days later he had it nailed and the rest, as they say, is history. Over the intervening 136 years Bell's ingenuity helped keep families in touch, speeded business communications and even saved lives and all seemed to be well. And yet here we are in 2012 having elevated the great grandchild of Bell's baby, the cell phone, to such great and intrusive heights that we now have laws that limit its use, constant complaints that the cell phone is too pervasive and even find ourselves on occasion blind sided by this wild child's super intelligence. In our over stimulated, excitement crazed society we have become Pavlovian slaves to the ring, buzz and blaring musical call of our cell phones. In our rush to commune with our fellow man we rely more and more on technology to do our work for us and the consequences can sometimes prove less than satisfactory. As a late comer to the fabulous smart phone I am dazzled by the technology that I hold in my hand every time my cell phone rings. Who doesn't love to have a million goofy apps at their fingertips or the ability to photograph friends doing dumb stuff we can then immediately post to our facebook pages? I know I do. But this amazing gizmo has a sting in the tail for fumble fingered fools like me who find it impossible to accurately peck more than two words an hour out to the waiting world. The culprit is something called predictive text, a marvellous feature as long as you double check what you typed before you press send. We have all been the victim or the amused recipient of one of these garbled messages at one time or another. The cell phone provider, Telus has even taken advantage of the comic nature of the predictive text of their smart phones in an advertisement currently running nightly where a distressed woman with a bad cold sits bolt upright in bed and declares that she has just texted her boss that she is in bed with a nasty clown; Hilarious right? At its best predictive text is a great time saving tool, but more often than not it proves to be a booby trap. There is even a website devoted to the results of bad predictions called, damnyouautocorrect.com where a whole raft of messages purporting to be genuine are available to read as a good laugh at our expense, which is `all well and good until someone loses and eye', as my dear old grandma used to say. Consider the plight of a West Hall, Florida student, who last week sparked a full lockdown at his high school after failing to notice that the message he intended to send: "gunna be at West Hall today," ended up finding its way to a wrong number as: "gunman be at West Hall today." Naturally enough the shocked recipient of this errant message contacted the authorities and the lockdown was initiated. All of which is pretty funny, as long as the first responders showing up at the school ask questions first and hold off on shooting the innocent kid in the trench coat wandering the halls looking like a gunman. I suspect the next generation of smart phones will make Alexander Graham Bell proud with their far superior predictive text capabilities. I hope so anyway, I don't want to find myself sending out any more elephant massages to purple in my Ohio Bob!