For the most part, I love my Smart Phone. It allows me to access work emails when I’m out; I can text folks instead of calling them, and, likewise, people can reach me if they need to.
Oh yeah, and I can play Words with Friends and Angry Birds.
I love apps, but my husband loves them more than I do. He has tons and tons of them on his phone. And now he has one that I despise.
It’s the Grocery Store app.
I should love this app. I should at least like it. After all, it allows us to organize our grocery list and easily check things off when we go food shopping.
Great, right?! It saves paper too! It helps the environment!
I can’t help it. I still hate it.
The reason I hate it is because it requires my husband to type in everything before we go shopping. If we could do this on the computer, that would be great. Because I type up everything I write, I type extremely fast.
The app, though, requires my husband to type the list up on the tiny little touch-screen keyboard on his phone. And this takes forever.
As in “Waiting in a line at the department store on Black Friday” forever.
Before the advent of the app, we would brainstorm what items we needed from the store, and I would just write them down on a small spiral pad of paper.
Bing, bang, boom—we were finished.
But with this app, here’s how it goes: I think of “lettuce.” I tell my husband that we need it.
My husband types it into the app on his phone.
Slowly…
L…E…T…T…U…C…E…
Or however long it takes until it recognizes the word “lettuce.”
I have no patience for this. Perhaps my husband does because in the days before the internet—i.e. the days of our youth—he had been known to stand in line much, much longer to get tickets for a Def Leppard concert. Or Rush. Or any hairband that played during the ‘80s, ever.
The fact that it takes 30 minutes to type in a grocery list that would have taken us about five minutes doesn’t bother him.
But it bugs the heck out of me.
My husband knows this and has been trying to figure out a way to use the app and keep our marriage harmonious.
The other day, he says to me, “Shhhh…watch this!”
With that, he holds his phone up in front of his face and yells, “SPINACH!”
Then he does it again. “SPINACH!”
As proud as our puppy was when he finally learned not “to go” while inside, my husband turns to me and says, “Look! It’s in there!”
Sure enough, there is the word “spinach” listed in the grocery app of his phone.
Hmmmm, I think. Perhaps this could work out after all.
I was happy. He was happy. Life was great.
Until he tried to enter the next item.
“PIZZA SHELLS,” he screamed.
The phone came up with a message that said, “Choose from the following what you said.”
And the list was:
You
Can
Yes
Um, that wasn’t close. So he tried again: “PIZZA SHELLS!”
The next thing that came up was “Nordica.”
We have no idea what that has to do with pizza shells.
My husband decided that it must be under “pizza crust.” So, he yelled, “PIZZA CRUST!”
What came up?
“Happy Baby Play Outside”
Seriously?
Then it filed “turkey breast” under the “fruits and vegetables” category.
So here’s what I’ve decided: if my husband wants to spend lots of time screaming into his phone like a maniac to use this app, I’ll go with it.
Provided that the app also files under “fruits and vegetables” anything that begins with the word “chocolate.”
I think that’s a fair trade.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not laughing hysterically while her husband yells vegetable names into his phone, writes “Wojo’s World™” from Baltimore.