Canada - we just can't find the answer.

So I went out for dinner this evening, with Matt (the husband) to a place here called Philthy McNasty’s (your typical sports bar like place).

Wow, exciting news there Krystal. I know bare with me!

The people at the table next to us had finished eating while we were perusing the menus and called the waitress over and said “Do you know where the nearest pub is around here?”

Well Waitress didn’t happen to live in the city and didn’t know. So she went off and found Bartender, who came over claiming he knew all the pubs in the city, and yet still couldn’t come up with a name of one of them for these people. (Who were obviously out of town)

Now, here I am, biting my tongue from yelling out “THERE’S ONE RIGHT ACROSS THE ROAD!” to see if the man that was asking would be sensible and do what I was hoping he would do. Alas he wasn’t, and didn’t.

You see, the whole meal he had his Blackberry sitting on the table in front of him. Periodically picking it up and looking at it even though no email had actually come but simply to have that “I’m important and am clearly expecting an important email to show up at ANY second” aura about him.

But here we are, with 3 people now standing around trying to come up with the name or a location of any one of the probably 10 pubs we have in this city, when he simply could have picked up his Blackberry, which didn’t seem to be serving any other purpose at the time other than table ornament, TO GO ON THE WEB AND GOOGLE IT.

I’m sure a simple “pubs in….” search would have found him one. It’s not rocket science.

But see, we just don’t get it here (present company excluded). Our phones are for TELEPHONING. You know, that new fangled idea of dialing a number and having someone on the other end pick up and having a conversation with them.

Novel concept eh?

There’s a guy I work with, he’s 24. One would think, prime phone, text messaging, email, web, want the world on my phone type target. Today, I was showing him my N95 with “looooooooook! you can do this! and this! and it does this! and holding it just far enough away in case he was going to drool on it, and he goes “oh well it’s nice. But I like mine” and pulls out some 2 year old Samsung *thing* out of his pocket.

I almost fell over.

I took it from him and went, butbut, how do you send email? and what’s your text message limit? And he said “I never do that, it’s way too much hassle, I just call people. If someone sends me a text message, I just call them back.

And then I think I did actually fall over.

I can, no lie, have a text message typed and sent (even without using T9) faster than you can look up someone’s number in your contact list and hit “call” (voice dialing doesn’t count) text messaging is just so EASY. Especially if it’s just “when will you be home?” (the one that Matt gets everyday) and I know I’m not making his phone ring while he’s on site.

So back to our friend at the restaurant. The first thing I would have thought to do would be to pull up the web browser on my phone and search for pubs, not to even bother Waitress.

So why didn’t he? Doesn’t have a data plan? Possible, but something is sending down the email. (Plus the restaurant seemed to have wifi)

It’s just not something we do. We don’t *think* to use our phones for anything else other than to phone someone. Maybe send a text message, email if you’re really cool.

I wonder if they ever found their way to a pub.