Smart Phones … and Fish ’n Chips

They don’t call them smart phones for nothing. I’m not one to complain – don’t say it – but I swear my phone knows what I am thinking.

            Perusing the menus of nearby restaurants recently, I have noticed that the cost of eating out has skyrocketed. A nice clam plate is pushing $30. A meal of fish and chips, a little coleslaw and a dab of tartar sauce, a Friday night staple in our house during the summer, is not a cheap meal anymore. Don’t even think about a lobster roll. The price isn’t even on the menu.

            My bride and I usually get a plate for each of us, but last year we started buying one large order and splitting it. I mean, come on, how much does a piece of fish and a potato cost? So, I checked out the cost of a deep fryer online, thinking we could fry up our own delicious repast. After adding up the cost of a nice piece of fish, a potato, a jug of cooking oil, mayonnaise, relish and lemon, it wouldn’t be quite the cheap eats I thought.

            Anyway, I was grouching – I don’t complain – about smart phones. It wasn’t 10 minutes before an ad popped up advising me of the five best deep fryers for 2023. Ever since, while scanning the headlines on my phone to find out if the world is still here, an ad for deep fryers would interrupt my research. Before every news article, a 26-second ad would precede it. Sometimes the ad is longer than the story.

            I’m old, and I don’t have time to waste on these interruptions. Pretty soon, fryer ads would show up on my tablet and computer. These things speak to each other!

            I was looking for a new pair of shoes recently and, sure enough, now I’m being accosted by every online shoe store in the land: Shoe World, Shoes for U, The Shoe Store (these guys sure are presumptuous.) They are all at my cyber portal.

            Enough already! But no, my “smart” TV wants to tell me what I should watch. Even during the most exciting part of a show, it will flash an ad a third the size of the screen telling me I should watch such-and-such next week at 9:00 pm. The darn things are even animated, which is even more annoying. But, I’m not complaining.

            My daughter was complaining – that must have come from her mother not me, I don’t complain – about getting endless ads on her phone for red dresses after a conversation with a friend about something red. The phone even knew she was a she!

            I now know the darn thing knows what I am thinking even before I do. Sometimes an ad comes up on my phone before I even search for something, and I’m not the only one that thinks that. I read that a fellow said he was looking at Cadbury chocolate fingers in a candy-store window. Though he’d rarely buy candy and especially not that brand, ads for Cadbury chocolate fingers started popping up on his phone. Spooky!

            I’ve been thinking about buying a new laser printer. Ever since, I’ve gotten a multitude of ads for every printer brand on the market. The strategy of annoyance worked. I bought one.

            No fish and chips this week.

            Editor’s note: Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and retired newspaper columnist whose musings are, after some years, back in The Wanderer under the subtitle “Thoughts on ….” Morgado’s opinions have also appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.

By Dick Morgado