All of a sudden, the cell phone rings. And of course, like Pavlov did with his dogs, you’re trained to look at it.  You see a picture of your friend and their phone number and their name, all there.  You think to yourself, do I want to pick up or do I not want to pick up? Do I really want to talk to this person?  Are they going to zap me of my energy?  Are they going to keep my mood where it is right now?  Is the conversation going to be one-sided?  Am I even in the mood to talk to this person?

It’s always a mystery what your friend is going to say. Maybe your friend has been going through some major life issues and has been talking about it for the past month. So you know they’re going to talk about something that you don’t want to engage in anymore.

This is where new technology can really help us all. All these phones are linked up with Facebook and Twitter nowadays, so your pictures always show up when someone calls. But it’s always the same picture.

How about if someone came up with some software where the picture that shows up was live.  When you call someone, your camera phone would take a picture of you and display it as an icon. Now your friend can finally see exactly what you look like when you call.  Hell, you could be smiling, you could be angry, but he’ll know it right away.  That way he’ll see the live picture of you as you call and then decide whether he wants to be engaged, just like in real life.

If you see someone coming at you angry, you don’t want to talk to them.  If you see someone coming at you smiling, you naturally want to talk to them.  So if your friend is pissed off and angry and you’re in a great, mellow mood, you won’t pick up the phone.

That’s what I think is going to have to happen.  In order for our phone pick up ratio to increase, we’re going to need to see a live picture.  For dating, my God—it’s endless.

You have no idea if this woman is calling you or why she’s calling you.  You’re hoping at 11:00 when she calls you at night it’s a booty call, but in reality she could be calling just to chat. But with my new recognition software, you’ll see that she’s totally naked, vibrator by her side, thinking whether or not to use it. Or she’s wearing something sexy and she calls you, you know she’s look for action.

I think this is great!  A live picture of people so you know exactly how to respond to your phone, just like in real life. I think we have found the next level in dating, the next level in phone sex. Forget about it.  The next level in communication!

You’ll know whether to flirt or not to flirt. And how about all of you guys that have talked to customer service reps and you think they’re hot on the other end of the phone. You have no idea what they look like, but you think they’re hot, so you start flirting with them and it turns out they’re 80 years old, but they just had a young voice. Ha, but not with my facial recognition software!

You guys probably think I’m crazy. But I can guarantee you this stuff is going to come and it’s going to happen pretty soon.  It’s a great idea, but unfortunately, I just don’t know how to bring it to market.

Anybody want to help?  Anybody out there in Bloglandia want to help me bring this to market?  We will make millions billions together and have a lot of fun exposing people’s true intentions before they call.

“Hey Jim, what is that?” “That’s my iPhone.” Do you get it? It’s like “eye” and “my phone” together — the iPhone!

You know, I think the next thing that should come out to challenge the iPhone should be the EarPhone, because technically all phones go to your ears. Your eye sees the phone, and the ear holds and listens to the phone.

That’s the EarPhone. So somebody please come up with the EarPhone.

What about the LipPhone? Because if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Your eye sees the phone, your ear listens to the phone and your lips talk to the phone.

So you’ve got the iPhone, the EarPhone and the LipPhone. What’s next?

How about the AssPhone? That is where you get a chip in your asshole and you answer it. It would be interesting. It would probably be kind of muffled if the speaker was up your ass, but then again some of the current smartphones are like AssPhones because they have the worst speakers in the world in them.

It’s funny about these phones. They’re all trying to compete with one another.

You’ve got the BlackBerry, which really isn’t even a BlackBerry anymore. It now comes in all different colors. So why don’t they call the red one a RedBerry and the blue one the BlueBerry and just call it a day.

You have the clamshell phone. I always expected that phone to leak fluid all over me like a real clam would.

These smartphones, though, are hilarious. They’re all trying so hard to compete with each other. They want to jam as much energy into these phones as possible. They’re essentially a computer, a bluetooth and a GPS device all in one phone.

Hell, you don’t need anything anymore because there is an app you can get for anything you could possibly need. It’s amazing — there is an app for everything it seems.

You want a girlfriend or a boyfriend? There’s an app for it. It’s called GirlApp and BoyApp. It’s too much all this, really.

Now tablets are being made all over the place. They call them a tablet, however, to me a tablet was always a hit of Ecstasy or acid. That was a tablet. It’s funny the terms we use and the way we say things.

Now Samsung has the tablet, and the iPad is a pad. It doesn’t really feel like a pad. It feels more like a piece of glass in my hands.

Of course, if you ever buy any of this technology when it first comes out then you’re an idiot. New technology is like a first date — they don’t give you it all. They want to tease you as much as they possibly can.

That is what new technology does. It teases you.

I have an iPad, but I got it for free. I never would have bought it, because I knew that like all Apple products, there would be a second generation product that would be much better.

You can almost hear Apple now saying, “Oh wow, we never thought about having a camera on the first generation iPad.” Yeah right.

They knew about it the first time around, they just wanted to go and make $1 billion selling that. It’s called marketing folks. So that’s why you need to wait for the second generation of anything.

So, as always, what does this rant and rave have to do with dating? Well I just gave you something funny to talk about on a date or when you want to meet someone.

When you see somebody grabbing their phone, you can look at them and say, “Aha! The iPhone that really goes on your ear. So it’s really an EarPhone with lips talking into it.”

See I am giving you hilarious things to talk about — or at least I think they are pretty damn funny. Say someone has a tablet, you can go up to them and say, “God, that is not as powerful as the acid I used to do in college.”

So talk about technology. It’s always easy to talk about how technology keeps getting crazier and crazier.

If you think about it, everything you read here on the blog is a discussion you can have on a date. Of course it is. I’m giving you great date topics of conversation here every day.

So for all of you who email me asking what you should talk about tonight on your date, I say why don’t you talk about this blog? Send my blog to like a thousand people today. I’d appreciate it, and then a thousand more people wold have something to talk about the next time someone whips out their iPhone.

The iPhone – they sound so proud of that name. Very cute Steve Jobs. What a fantastic job when it comes to coming up with new technology. As far as the iPad goes, I can only imagine that what is coming next is is the EarPad and the LipPad.

I feel like Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes right now. Wait, was this just my Andy Rooney moment?

Technology is amazing. It really is. Technology can really simplify certain things.
That part of technology is great and amazing.

I mean, I can go away on vacation or a business trip and be able to access all my emails from my iPhone. Then when I return, I’m no longer inundated with phone messages and emails because I was able to address a lot of them while I was gone.

With the Internet, I can stay in touch with people I probably never would otherwise. I can post blogs on my BlackBerry or iPhone. There are so many things we can do so much more easily now with technology.

There are some of the simpler things in life which are gone with all the current technology, however, that I do miss. I was listening to an ‘American Top 40′ show on the 70s station of my satellite radio. Listening to some of those songs brought back a lot of memories.

Remember the days when you were dating and you called someone on a pay phone, and the operator would keep coming on the phone asking you to deposit another $0.35? So many times you wouldn’t have any more change but you didn’t want the phone call to end, so you’d start checking the phone and the ground for lost change. For those of you who don’t remember this, allow me a minute to reminisce.

The problem with the whole pay phone thing as someone who was living in New York City, was that pay phones were generally pretty disgusting. The smell of the mouthpiece alone was always repulsive. That part of “simpler” times I don’t miss at all!

What I do miss is coming home to an answering machine and seeing who called you when you were gone. With cell phones and everything right at your fingertips, you don’t get to experience that feeling you got when you came home to a blinking light on an answering machine (signaling that you had messages).

I remember meeting someone and coming home hoping to see that blinking light, and then arriving home to find either no blinking light or that the blinking light was a message from someone else. It was part of dating — that anticipation about the answering machine.

There was no *69. You couldn’t just pick up the phone, dial *69 and see who called you. There was no Caller ID so you couldn’t even see the phone number of that girl who called you but didn’t leave a message.

Dating was more about guessing. You’d wonder, “When is this person going to call? How long are they going to wait to call me?”

Back then if you were in a relationship and got into a fight, you’d be out with your friends and be calling on your answering machine and having to put in your “secret code” to check your messages (and see if your significant other had called). I remember how much fun it was to have a secret code.

Answering machines “voices” back then sounded so mechanical. That voice telling you how many messages you had didn’t resemble a human voice in any way.

I also used to change my answering machine message constantly. I’d change the song I’d put on there and my greeting depending on my mood. I always wanted to create a good listening experience for the women who called me.

One time I had the theme song from “The Brady Bunch” on my answering machine message and came home to about 37 hang-up “clicks” on my answering machine. When I answered the phone the next time the phone rang, i asked the woman on the phone if she was the one who had been calling and hanging up, and she said it was her and that she just wanted to hear that Brady Bunch song over and over again.

Those were some good times. They were simpler times.

Technology certainly is great. With technology you can cruise the Internet. You can go on a website like match.com and meet someone amazing from somewhere across the country, and you can communicate in real time with anyone in the world. You can get a phone call when you’re driving and not have to wait until you’re home.

What you miss with all this technology and instant results is the suspense you used to have with things. It was like Christmas and waiting to see what Santa brought you. You’d come home and be excited to see if you got a message and, if so, from whom. Sometimes you were happy because it was that woman you called earlier, and other times you were a little disappointed because it was just your friend leaving you a message.

I wouldn’t want to go back in time and be without all the awesome technology of today, but I think it would be fun to be able to go back in time for a week or so and get to re-experience all that great anticipation I used to feel. What do you miss that is gone now because of technology? Share with me your favorite story.
Also, share with me your favorite answering machine story or the thing you miss most from when you were young and dating.