My iPhone Says I'm A Slug

I love my iPhone 6 Plus. It's large screen and extended battery life makes it a delight to use. Unfortunately it has one flaw--it's a total nag. Why? Because it reminds me every day how sedentary my life as an anesthesiologist can be.

Anybody who uses iOS 8 has Apple's Health app on their iPhone. The annoying thing about Health app is that it cannot be turned off or deleted. It is always working in the background tracking your every movement. I discovered this a couple of months after getting my new iPhone when I happened to open the Health app out of curiosity. Lo and behold it had counted how many steps I'd been taking and how many stairs I'd climbed every day since I bought the phone.

At first I thought this is great. Who needs to spend extra money on a fitness band when my phone can already track my steps for me. Pretty soon the Health app became an obsession. I started checking it several times a day to see how active I was. Quickly it became clear that my gluteus maximus was supporting more of my body weight than my calfs.

Most days I average a little over 5,000 steps a day. Not great I know. I'm just telling it like it is. But those 5,000 steps are made very episodically. On a long, uneventful case, I discovered I sometimes take as few as 8 steps an hour. EIGHT! I take more steps than that walking from a bathroom stall to a sink. It's really pathetic that sometimes my longest walk of the day is from the doctor's parking lot to the operating room.

Since I do 100% of my own cases I have the luxury (or curse) of being involved in lengthy uninvolving procedures. If I was supervising several CRNA's I'm sure I would add a few thousand more steps to my daily routine. Since I don't, I have forced myself to go back to the gym more regularly. (One more reason why I haven't blogged as regularly recently.) I found out if I run a couple of miles on the treadmill then I will just barely edge past the magical 10,000 steps per day regimen.

Now I'm not so sure I want to get the Apple Watch anymore. I don't need another device to tell me to get up and walk around. One of the main purposes of purchasing the watch is for its fitness tracking functions. But I'm already aggravated by my phone's ceaseless stalking of my daily routines. If I wanted more nagging, I would just stay at home more often.

I Hate The New iOS Calendar

Indulge me for a few minutes while I rant about something not related to medicine. I recently upgraded my iPhone's operating system to iOS 7.1, just like most Apple lemmings, I mean loyalists, do when they get their friendly reminder from the company to do so. The upgrade went without a hitch, as they usually do. There are a few cosmetic changes that are neither here nor there in relevance to my daily use. However, when I checked my Calendar, there was a huge surprise in store, and not in a good way like Christmas or birthday surprises.

Anybody who uses the Calendar app on the iPhone knows that days that have appointments are marked with a little dot on the monthly view. I usually keep my call schedule on the Calendar. But when I opened up Calendar after the upgrade, I suddenly noticed a bunch of new little dots that were not there before. Curious, I zoomed in to the daily view and this is what I found. Apple has kindly filled in my calendar, without asking for any permission, with events it thought I might find important.

As you can see from the screen shot above, the company thought I would want to know when Earth Day is this year. Dear Apple, I do not need or want to know when Earth Day is. I know your company and employees consider yourselves all progressive and environmentally friendly. But my kids will be bringing plenty of propaganda home from school on that day to remind our family what wasteful heathens we are for not recycling every little scrap of paper and plastic in the trash bag. I don't need my phone to nag me about the same thing. Apple also thought I might want a reminder on my calendar about when Cinco de Mayo occurs. Hello!! The name of that day is also the date on the calendar. I do not need a reminder on May 5th that that day is Cinco de Mayo in Spanish.

They also thoughtfully filled in Christian themed holidays for me. That is a total intrusion of privacy and I do not appreciate them pushing a religion on my phone. What if I celebrate Rosh Hashanah? Somehow that day hasn't been placed into my calendar. What if I observe Ramadan? That also wasn't approved by Apple as an official holiday to push at its users without permission. As a liberal left wing corporation, Apple should know better than to push religion on anybody. Do their Calendar app people work out of Texas?

So Apple, please do another upgrade soon so that these corporate preapproved holidays and events are removed. They are a distraction when I need to check my calendar for an appointment and a total invasion of privacy. I don't need to know when Flag Day is in the year 2015.

Not So Evil Anymore

Many of you read have read my rants against my evil iPhone. In my mind, the iPhone was a method by which the messiah Steve Jobs ensnared his victims into the world of Appleology. All the technology geeks out there who bemoaned the monopolistic practices of Microsoft suddenly couldn't get enough of the tightly controlled ecosystem that is the iPhone and iTunes. The Jesus Phone appeared to be a device by which the weak minded go trapped into its cult. I shuddered at what I was getting myself into. Would I soon be brainwashed by this technologic orthodoxy and start knocking on strangers' doors to convert the heathens to this new religion?

But now I've changed my mind. The iPhone isn't merely a really bad cell phone with a great ability to waste away your day playing Angry Birds. (Full disclosure. I did download that game, but only the free versions. I'm not about to give more money to the high priest.) But I've discovered apps that can actually save me money. I found an app that can download books for free. Now these books are only in the public domain, ie/ before 1923. But that covers a lot of territory. So if you ever wanted to revisit your Western Literature class in high school, this is the perfect program. I've read books by Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Allen Poe since I've downloaded this program. I never have to buy another paperback anymore if I want to catch up on my literary classics. At about $10 per paperback, my savings are really adding up. Anna Karenina or Romeo and Juliet anyone?

I've also found the iPhone to be the best babysitter. You see it everywhere you go. At restaurants, children no longer take part in conversations at the table. They're all staring down at their iPhone/iPods playing games or texting each other. I've converted my DVD's into the iPhone format. Now the kids can watch Cars, Toy Story 3, and any other of their favorite DVD's at home and watch it outside when I need some peace and quiet. I normally wouldn't condone this sort of activity but sometimes we all need just a few minutes of respite from the whining and complaints that accompany small children when they go out..

So here's another paean to the Almighty Mr. Jobs. My iPhone still gets awful reception at my home. But its other uses makes it completely indispensible. Goodness I hate you for that.

My iphone, seduced by the dark side

Sorry I haven't posted in quite some time. I'm being initiated into a cult. I consider its insidiousness right up there with Scientology and the Theory of Global Warming. Of course I'm talking about my new Apple iphone (or iPhone?). I couldn't stand it anymore. I watched day after day as legions of residents and attendings stand like zombies in the hospital hallways and elevators, flicking their fingers over that seductive glass surface, completely oblivious to the patient gurney about to run over them. At meetings, everybody is furtively glancing down at their iphones, trying to be inconspicuous in their contempt of the speaker and his topic at hand. It all reminds me, ironically of Apples infamous 1984 commercial. Except this time the face of the Supreme Leader on the screen is Steve Jobs and as yet there is no pretty blond lady to smash the spell the Leader is casting over his lemmings.

I tried to console myself by stating the obvious; there are millions of dollars worth of computer monitors all over the hospital. All I need out of my cell phone is a phone. I don't need no freaking internet browser, music player, compass, GPS navigator, gazillions of apps, etc. in my pocket. Why do I need to pay a mandatory extra $30/month for a data plan and even more money for simple text messaging? Why doesn't an unlimited data plan cover texting also? But my cell phone was over two years old and starting to do funny things, like rebooting itself in the middle of a conversation. Plus my wife freaked when she found out her phone had above average radiation emission and wanted a new phone. So my decision came down to two phones, get a Blackberry with its higher learning curve and radiation exposure or succumb to the dark side.

To the dark side did I befall.

So far, it has been...okay. When I downloaded itunes (iTunes?) for the first time, it promptly reconfigured my entire music collection from WMA to AAC, which believe it or not took about 20 hours. I had to tell everybody in the house not to touch the computer during that time, just in case somebody forgets and accidentally turns it off. What can I say, I have a huge music collection on my computer. So now I have two sets of files for each song on my hard drive. The iphone has an annoying safety feature where I have to type in a Passcode to unlock the phone so I can make a simple phone call. It's nice in case my phone ever gets stolen but downright dangerous when I'm trying to call somebody while driving in rush hour traffic. Remember the iphone has no keyboard so my finger is just kind of hovering over where I think the keys should be to type my password while trying to maneuver in urban traffic. My final criticism that I'll bring up here, though by no means the last criticism of the iphone, is that the apps are WAY overrated. There is an entire category devoted to the medical field but the anesthesia subcategory is woeful. There are a few anesthesia handbooks for downloading. But rather than flicking through my phone, wasting battery life, it would be much easier for me to carry a copy of an anesthesia handbook for referral. As far as games are concerned, who has time for games? Certainly not at work. And I've got plenty on my plate at home to have time for games.

So that's what I've been doing with all my free time in the last week. The exercise program has taken a temporary break for now (but also because I came down with a cold but that's another blog entry for later). I've got the iphone functionally just about where I want it. My wife's days and nights of being an iphone widow is almost over. And I can start blogging again about the crucial health care reform votes that are coming up along with how they are going to continue to screw the medical and anesthesia professions.