On Opposable Digits

A big innovation in the history of evolution was the opposable thumb.

Little did nature know what a big deal this would be. Today the thumb is perhaps the most important feature of the human body. It can hold pencils. It can open doors and can and jars. It can play the bassoon. But most importantly, the thumb can press buttons on a cellular phone!

Ah yes! The thumb is by far the most important tool in modern communication.

Faced with possible imminent failure of my SIM card, I spent parts of today and yesterday transferring all the names and phone numbers in my cell phone on to a Google spreadsheet so that in the chance of a true SIM card death, I won't have to send out one of those dreadful "I lost my phone in a public subway toilet!" emails or form my own Facebook group. As I went through and typed each number in by hand, it also allowed me the opportunity to edit a phonebook that had been accumulating, but not purging, for at least my last three years of my life. So who, you may ask, was important enough to stay? Well I'll tell you:

A hit man in the Korean mafia in Salt Lake

My ex-boyfriend's sister who I met once for lunch

Two blind dates from Ohio, one of whom is engaged

No less than five currently engaged men, not counting the Ohioan blind date

Marlene, the widowed mother of my best friend from college

A gay man at Harvard

The passcode to the Cell Science Imaging Facility

All those, among others, were deemed worthy to stay. But alas, not all were so lucky. Among those deleted forever from my cell phone and my spreadsheet (and thus my memory) were:

My brother-in-law

An Olympic volleyball player

A former blind date from MIT who now consults for McKinsey

My second prom date

My roommate of two years

and Everyone named Rachel

I feel much better after deleting these people from my phone book.

The truth is that I could resurrect any of these numbers fairly easily. I'm probably still friends with all of them on Facebook, and if I'm not, I will be eventually. So why let their numbers needlessly clutter up my phone? As I've been reading this week in Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, globalization 3.0 means not having store everything in my house and home when it can all be stored on a server by someone else virtually!

Taking this to heart, I used my most advanced technology-- my thumb-- to delete all those extra numbers from my phone. Turns out these opposable digits come in handy in dealing with disposable digits all these millions of years later.