The "No I" Phone

It's a cheap party trick: I pull out my phone, flip it open to check the time or send a quick text, and watch for the reactions.

In the decades I've owned a flip phone, people have given me a few double takes. Recently, though, when I opened my phone to squint at a photo texted to me, the person sitting across the conference table surprised me with a "Haha! I love your phone!"

And I did, too. I loved my flip phone.

Then, in a deadly mistake of distracted domesticity, I scooped it up with my bed sheets and dropped it in the washing machine: Eco Cold, extra spin.

Oh gentle readers, the tragedy of beautiful T9 predictive text programming drowned at the bottom of the linens spin cycle!

Yes, I lost saved phone numbers, the blurry store photos I'd snapped over the years to double check prices when back to internet access, the text threads with details about addresses and meet-ups... all lost. Sad, inconvenient, annoying, frustrating, all of it.

But the biggest tragedy, the greatest inconvenience, the thing that has brought me the nearest to being spitting mad: the loss of a contract, a decision made in some far off location at some point years ago. Because the T9 predictive text program on my new flip phone has sent me back to the dark ages. Or has brought out the monster in me. Or has caused me to doubt some of what makes up my very identity.

This has been no small crisis, gentle readers: the flip phones currently on the market are all "no I" phones. The most basic of English words, the most fundamental expression of the human self, the critical component of messaging that allows for deescalating tension: it ought to be possible with simply a single key stroke, or at the very least, two simultaneous key strokes. But no, getting a capital "I" on these phones takes far more than that, and all thanks to a lost contract between tech companies. 

Getting an "I" has proved so elusive that sometimes it is far easier to completely rewrite my message than to manage the particular sequence to make "I" show up on my screen. Short of that, my options are to sound as though I'm sending the message with charcoal on the inside of the cave wall, "Me love you" or to squash and silence my interior editor identity, "Sometimes i edit professionally."

On previous phones, I've managed to perfect getting to words not in the dictionary quite handily. For instance, covid is simply cove, erase the e, add idea, erase the ea. Longer words I visualized as parts of multiple others; my email address being a combination of words not too dissimilar to a sentence about cars racing until they rolled. The trick has always been to find combinations of words that can peacefully coexist in my working memory until the whole intended word finishes taking shape. 

It's like a word game I get to play with myself. If ever I'm not in the mood, I can just swap out the words for easier synonyms or choose to go into less detail. All those years of being limited to 160 characters in a text really cultivated my editing skills. (You need a shorter word count? Send it to me, I'll be happy to help!)

Yet none of those skills help me sub for I. No easier synonyms, no path to fewer details unless to erase myself entirely. Going third person? Ug! 

I am, therefore I is necessary.

Fortunately, I have found a better option: to find a shorter route to capital I than the current route of nine key strokes. The dictionary unexplainably recognizes contractions like I'll and I'm so I could always go for them and erase the extra letters, but it messes with my train of thought to have the wrong verb attached to me and even for these simple contractions I have to stop and hunt down the right form amongst the T9 homographs. Instead, I've found the name Igor a help. Even AI, minus the A gets me to my "I" faster.

If I were the old geezer ranting type, you'd be reading now about how our culture has gone down the tubes when we're so all-fired intent on getting ahead that the stuff that makes the foundation of society possible gets forgotten. Luckily for you, I'm not an old geezer (yet) and I'm not ranting as I am writing this on a full-size Qwerty keyboard and not my (severely lacking) T9 keys.

And yet, gentle reader, if you text me and I'm slow to respond, whether or not you see Igor or AI when my answer finally pops up on your phone, know I am engaging in an ongoing existential dialog every time I flip to my text messages on my no I phone.