Smartphones and Vampire Fingers

I've finally joined the 21st century and have gotten a smart phone.  As of last Sunday, I am now the proud owner of an iPhone 5.  I've quite enjoyed smartphone-land, but there's one problem that is starting to annoy me...

Apparently, I have vampire fingers.

I should have noticed this a long time ago.  After all, there were signs ...

1) During my first year of high school, we did a Biology lab in which which had to draw blood from our lab partner and test the blood to determine blood type.  We were each given a bunch of small sterilized metallic shards we had to strike our lab-partner's fingers with ( in order to break the skin the draw blood ) .  I was able to draw my lab partner's blood without much of a problem, but when he struck my finger with the little shard, nothing happened.

Well, actually, perhaps it's not quite accurate to say nothing happened.  It did sting quite a bit and there certainly was a little hole in my right index finger, but no matter how hard I squeezed, I couldn't get blood to come out of that little hole.  So, we tried the experiment again using my left finger, and got the same result - pain, a hole in the finger, but no blood.  Finally we tried my right ring finger and managed to get a little bit of blood out.

2) My vampire fingers surfaced again a few years later with the portable fingerprint scanner I needed to use to log in remotely to my office's network.  I could eventually get the thing to read my fingerprint, but it usually took about 10 tries.  I went to PC support to try to get the problem solved.  They tried out a few new fingerprint scanners, but I had the same problem with each one.  Finally the PC support guy just gave up and enabled a backdoor that would allow me to log into the network without fingerprint authentication ( which was so against the security rules that he whispered the information to me so nobody else could hear. ).

3) About a month ago, I went to a new doctor to get my first checkup in several years.  He was a bit concerned about my unusually low pulse rate ( It's usually in the low 50s when I'm at rest ), so he made me go through a bunch of tests.  One of the tests was a blood oxygen test which is done by sticking one's finger in a little device.  The device gave me such a low reading that the guy giving the test was surprised that I wasn't fainting right there and then.  Yeah - so basically blood oxygen finger testing devices can't detect much oxygen or blood in my fingers.  So, it does appear that I have vampire fingers ( or perhaps zombie fingers ).

So, as you might imagine, vampire fingers and smart phones don't really work well together.  There are plenty of times when I simply can't get the iPhone to recognize that I'm touching something on a screen.  I know that I don't have a faulty iPhone, because each time I ask my wife to push a button that doesn't work for me, it works fine for her.  This doesn't happen with most iPhone applications ( thank goodness ), but unfortunately, it's a big problem when I try to use the App Store or download a podcast from Podcenter.  You know that little box that says "free" on the App Store.  When you press that button, it's supposed to turn into a green bar that says "install" ( or "download", I forget which ), and then you push that little green bar to install your app.  I usually can't get that little "free" box to turn into the green box.  For more than half the apps I have, my wife needed to touch the "free" box for me.  The other problem is the little pointing-down arrow you need to touch on Podcenter to download a podcast.  Pushing that little Podcenter down-arrow only seems to work 5% of the time.  I've been downloading a lot of podcast to listen to on the train, but sometime it seems that I'm spending as much time trying to download podcasts that actually listening to them.

That being said, I can always get my normal-fingered wife to help out with this stuff, and aside from really small stuff like the Podcenter "down-arrow" of the App-Store "free" box, everything else seems to work fine.  I'm really loving the iPhone 5 so far.  Between the podcasts and all the newspapers I have apps for ( We have a weekend subscription to the New York Times, but that gives us full access 7-days a week online ), I have access to all the political/sports news I could ever want to digest.  Today, I listened to a podcast of "Meet the Press" on the train.  I'm really loving this.  Even with the vampire-fingers problem, I already can't imagine life without a smartphone.

Rich