The three of us on the same bed

NAUGHTY poet had once written a humorous little poem that went as follows: “If you find love, nurture it, enjoy it, guard it and at all cost, never let your spouse, find out!

” This is why many men and women are on constant guard over access to their mobile phones or rather smart phones. I think I’m getting old now because I distrust very new technologies and am slow to adapt them. I have only two major uses for my phone; talking and occasionally sending and receiving SMS messages.

And oh, I was forgetting, sending money to the various people who think I am well off and can afford to ‘fadhili’ them as well as Institutions that I owe money to like Luku and Dawasco. Occasionally I use it as a calculator and more frequently as a time piece.

And so my not-smart phone is more than adequate for my needs. There is a lot of marketing that goes on in my mobile phone without my consent; mobile phone companies convincing me that I can get more ‘bundles’ and greater access to internet time.

The bundles I know are firewood bundles that rural ladies carry on their heads as they head back home after toiling on the land.

There is also a lot of advertizing that tries to convince me that I can win millions by just texting certain messages to certain numbers… Far too many messages that I don’t like, I suppose it should be called junk text. Smart phones ( and the not so smart phones) are incredibly clever these days.

They have powerful cameras, google maps and so many applications (apps) that it is difficult to count. You can command them to do virtually anything, they are after all just miniaturized computers. One man commanded (without her consent, of course) his wife’s smart phone to forward all her incoming calls to his phone.

Listening in to her incoming calls, he ended up with high blood pressure and the marriage was never the same again. Some spouses like their marriages as institutions and respect their spouses but they cannot resist ‘michepuko’.

Since the mobile phone is the major means of communication they have to change or encode the names of boyfriends and girlfriends because the names of the opposite sex in the directory arouse jealousy in some spouses.

One of my friends had encoded his girlfriends in the phone book as the Global soccer stars. The short stocky girl was called Maradona.

One was Messi because she was so elusive and difficult to mark and he was still running around chasing after her.

A girl whose name was Victoria was named David Beckham on this man’s phone… It was an all men address book. But he said to himself it was his wife’s fault making trouble whenever she saw a girl’s name in his phone.