Especially if you mangle the language like that on a regular basis.

I have been working with professionals in the engineering field for a very long time. Each and every one of them is a major geek, and where possible, the company affords them all the very best toys, because access to the technology makes their lives easier and makes them more productive.

Today, for instance, I received three pieces of mail that included code for a machine that had to have it’s core software updated, a probing routine, and an XML file that was needed for an interface.

These three attachments came to my phone. One, I took out the flashcard and stuck it right into the machine. The second, I
moved to a memory stick and loaded onto a computer. The third, I took a short USB cable and used the machine’s operating system to download it off my phone.

One of these files came from Japan. I sent an email using my phone to the guy who could get it for me, in Hoffman Estates. he forwarded the email- from his phone- to japan, and woke up his colleague there, who fired up his netbook, emailed the file back to Hoffman estates, and the guy in hoffman estates mailed it back to me. Four of the five transactions took place by phone. I was on the road when i first got the call that the file needed to be updated. I called one of my colleagues and had him take a snapshot of the machine’s serial number and send it to me. I forwarded this from my phone, while driving, and by the time I arrived at the office I had the stuff i needed.

Professionals do this all day, every day. The people I work with spend SO much time doing this it seems like they’re always on the phone- but the reality is, web enabled phones with lots of features allow things to happen very, very quickly, and response time to new and unexpected situations approaches the instantaneous. What might have taken a month twenty years ago, took a week ten years ago, and now can go from problem to resolution in a matter of hours if not minutes.

It’s easy to point to the eighteen year old weaving back and forth in traffic while she complains to her BFF about WTF was her BF thinking when he kissed becky. What you don’t see is the professional who has been doing just the things I’ve been talking about, because the professional is capable of doing all those things and stilol driving safely.

If you’re doing two-handed driving, you don’t have any business TALKING on the phone, and everyone with a brain knows that. And in my daily commute, there are exactly zero seconds of two-handed driving. Much of my commute involves me moving a 60 in a long train of people moving 60, and during those times, I will talk on the phone, but I won’t place a call, I will only answer one and even then, only if I have a headset. If you hold the phone up to your head to talk while driving, you have devoted nearly a third of your motor skills to holding the phone. Bad idea.

A lot of my commute also involves being stopped dead in traffic. During those times I will look at email and send and receive mails and texts. I have been doing this for more than ten years, and I have never had so much as a close call, because I focus my attention on the drive first and the phone second. I also hold the phone in such a way as to use my primary vision to drive and my peripheral vision to use the phone. I stop looking at the phone altogether if traffic moves, and only allow myself to go back to the phone if traffic stops.

All of my colleagues do this, and they are all accident free. BTW, AT, all of these things that I do in heavy traffic, I also do at speed in lots of conditions, because I am capable of the judgement required to know how much timeslice to spend on my driving, and how much I can devote to other things. I drive more in a month than you probably do in a year. But keep hiding behind that keyboard throwing stones at people whose ballsweat you are unfit to lick.

Pointing to Buffy and painting all drivers with the same bloodstained brush is exactly like comparing mall ninjas to people like Caleb or Frank James, or Tam or Massad Ayoob. Most of the people who do this are professionals and you don’t hear about them because they have been doing this for years and will continue to do so, safely, because the phones they use have changed the very nature of the way they do business, and it is the only way they can do business anymore.

SO when you next cast aspersions on people who use cellphones when they drive, know this: We are not Buffy. We can do more than one thing at a time. All the world is manufactured by people like me, doing this all day, every day.