No, that was not a typo. I didn’t mean slender figure…
Before I clarify further, I need to take you on a minor Darwinian detour to get into the skin of this thing called evolution. Since Man first came to be on earth, he has been continuously evolving in keeping with the times. For instance teeth and jaws have shrunk as vegetarian diets proliferate. Light skin and blue eyes came about in places with less sunlight exposure. Brains enlarged to cope with the increasing complexity of making decisions from a multitude of choices, for example which OTT series to watch next, notwithstanding the fact that you would probably go back in the end to re-bingeing on Brooklyn 99 or The Office…
But here’s the nub - most of these changes were forced upon us by nature and were not man made, meaning we could go about the process of evolving at a glacial pace that sometimes spanned millennia. The technology era is however imposing a huge challenge on the need to dramatically speed things up. Will humanity be able to cope? How can we suddenly up our game and dramatically accelerate the the evolutionary process?
You may be a little bemused at my disquiet. Why do we need to evolve rapidly, you may wonder. Is it the AI revolution I’m alluding to? And where do slender fingers enter the equation? Stay with me while I walk you through the precarious situation that you’re already in and probably haven’t quite realized yet.
If you are an “abbreviation person”, phrases like LOL, ROFL, OMW are probably part of your active lexicon. But I find it incomprehensible that the one thing that we need to say most often has not yet been abbreviated by humans. I am talking about DBM. Or its cousin, DBE. Dialled by Mistake. Or by Error.
Think about it. How often, when you finish a call and then casually swipe the screen to close it, has your clumsy finger accidentally triggered another call? Or you want to select a number from a list on the touch screen, but your index finger inadvertently selects the adjacent one and you don’t even realize it sometimes till the strange voice on the phone jolts you into facing up to the fact that you had DBMed…
And don’t get me going on how frequently I see a whatsapp group call being initiated by some poor soul whose fingers seem to have a mind of their own? Infact, have you ever seen a bonafide whatsapp group call? It’s almost always a case of DBM.
Lest you run away with the superficial insight that this is about wrong calls, I would urge you to stay and hear the whole of it. I next point to the phenomenon of the 2 second voice note in whatsapp groups! Clearly triggered by some errant finger pressing on the mic button unintentionally. The note, if you’re lucky, will probably be blank, but it could just as easily trigger world war 3 if you were verbally indiscreet during those two seconds when your finger was playing the dirty on you. The worst case scenario here is of course when you suddenly notice on your phone screen that a call is actually in progress for the last 40 seconds, thanks to your errant finger having dialled your boss…
In the good old days of the manual typewriter, there was so much space between the keys that I even remember my fingers getting stuck in between keys while typing! In the relentless thrust of miniaturization, the keypad became progressively smaller as we graduated to PCs, then laptops. Now with the mobile phone, we have hit rock bottom, with the keypad being compressed into such a small area that the average button area is 0.5 square cm (source : the omniscient ChatGPT). The same Omniscient One also tells me that the average thumb area which is in contact with a mobile phone button is 1.5 square cm. That’s 3 times the button area!!! So mathematically speaking, there is always a 66% chance you don’t press the right button!
What really drives me up the wall are some of these evil websites that I get directed to. You land on their page unsuspectingly, but soon enough there are a bunch of pop ups containing ads, cookie notifications and the like. To read or see what you primarily wanted to, you have to go through the excruciating step of closing each of these popups by pressing a microscopic “close” button which will typically be 0.01 sq cm in area, with your 1.5 sq cm sized thumb! To make things interesting, this has to be sometimes achieved while the page is loading jerkily, making the already miniscule bulls eye a moving target on top of it! I never get it right, and sure enough, the next thing I know is that I’m being asked to confirm the payment mode for an annual subscription to some random service.
Make no mistake. Finger obesity is rapidly becoming the next health epidemic. I am sure, over generations, our fingers will slowly adapt and evolve into slim, reed like structures, but this transition is simply not going to keep pace with that of technology’s relentless and rapid march towards miniaturization.
Mankind, having obsessed about hearts, brains, livers and even kidneys, is waking up sheepishly to the fact that it had collectively taken this appendage rather for granted. That the size and shape of our fingers would play any role at all in our lives has been a rude surprise. Take my dad, for instance; slim and dapper for his age, he has an unusual handicap. He has stub-like thumbs, completely out of proportion to his frame. The number of times he DBMs me or my siblings is legendary in family circles. It’s actually a miracle that he has not yet been snared into supporting some large Nigerian family’s lifetime expenses on account of his uncontainable thumb.
People of my vintage marvel at how even very young kids are seemingly so adept at the mobile, displaying no discomfiture whatsoever. For simplistic minds, this constitutes a paradox, whereas I present it as living evidence of my theory. Just give them time. Let their tender bodies and thus the fingers grow larger and we’ll then see how they start fumbling…
Let’s face it, we are helplessly caught between the mismatch of the rapid speed of technological disruption and the more unhurried and generational evolution of nature. Probably not going to happen in my lifetime. But being an eternal optimist, I googled “exercise for slender fingers”, and was absolutely thrilled to get about 17 million hits! After much tortuous navigation of these websites though, I figured out that the top two suggestions were “avoiding sodium” and “drinking lots of water”. Clearly, not the beginning of the solution that I’d hoped for, more a dead end…
There it is, then. Chances are, till we evolve into lean-fingered versions of the homo sapien species, we are doomed to miscommunicate whenever we set out to type words, that much is clear. The only upside of this is that the wide prevalence of this problem makes it a very credible excuse even when you type exactly what you wanted to, but feel it politically wise to retract. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it – I typed (or dialled, or pressed) by mistake” has the potential to be a very valid get-out-of-jail-free card whenever you want to get out of a tricky spot. I would go as far to say that in the all-time list of undebatable excuses, this one can occupy the top spot, in the process dislodging the latecomer’s legendary “sorry, Mumbai traffic, you know…”.
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