You Are My Every Thing

When I got to my bus stop this morning, the one that takes me to the subway on my hour-long commute into the heart of Toronto, I instinctively reached for my iPhone. And it wasn’t there. So I reached for it again. But it still wasn’t there. My first thought was to quickly call my wife and ask her to drive down to the bus stop and drop it off, but then I realized (for the third time now) that I didn’t have my phone! I went into fight-or-flight mode just as the bus pulled up. I tensed my leg muscles, went into a half-crouch, ready to run home, until I processed that it would take me 8 minutes there and 8 minutes back and I was already on the verge of being late. Plus it was raining. So instead of running away, I got on the bus. I felt an adrenaline crash and some mild panic as I sat down. I couldn’t do anything! So I did what anyone in my position would do: I took out my laptop and wrote down all of the things I use my phone for during the morning commute.

WHAT I CAN’T DO DURING THE MORNING COMMUTE IF I FORGET MY PHONE!
a list by Jason Theodor

• text “have a great morning” to my family
• check the weather
• check the time
• check my calendar for the morning adgenda
• check if my bus is going to be on time with NextBus
• check my priority gmail messages
• double check my work email
• reply to emails and text co-workers
• think of something random and look it up on google, google image search, or wikipedia
• check my twitter messages and reply to mentions on the Twitter app
• check my facebook, like things, comment on things, and reply to messages
• reluctantly check my Klout score on the app
• work on the newsletter for sponsors of my book on MailChimp
• read Zite articles on the bus
• change to reading Flipboard articles when I get sick of Zite
• add a to-do item to my OmniFocus app
• check-in on FourSquare to remain the mayor of my bus stop
• follow a Path alert to a photo one of my friends took on his way to work
• follow the realtime location of my bus on Google Maps, check to see if the roads are ‘green’ ahead
• play Angry Birds while I’m in the subway and have no internet
• read Book 5 of the Song of Fire and Ice series on my Kindle app
• write a quick note about my next blog post on either Pages or Evernote
• double-check the exact meaning of a word with the Dictionary app
• see someone reading an article in Metro (free daily paper) with a catchy headline and open the Metro app to read it
• take a Hipstamatic photo of something interesting I see on the way to work
• listen to music
• call home to tell my wife I forgot my phone!

I’m going to start calling my phone something else. It’s not a phone. I almost never use it for calls. It’s a touch/location/direction/velocity/pitch&yaw/voice enabled micro-computer. I’m going to call it the Every Thing.

When my daughter was packing her kit for Art Camp she started to panic. Her list required a ruler. We couldn’t find one in the house, and a tape measure just didn’t seem practical. Even though a small plastic ruler costs less than a dollar, we didn’t have time to go shopping.

Looking at her kit again, I noticed a set of wooden Popsicle sticks. They are hard and straight like a ruler, but lack the appropriate notches. Wondering what I could use for reference I remembered the iHandy Carpenter app I had bought for my iPhone for $1.99.


Using the ruler in the app for reference, and a fancy felt tip ink pen I use to make notes, I started creating an ad hoc ruler. I called it The Rulercicle™.

This simple tool became the envy of her class and my daughter was asked if she could take orders.

It cost a few cents (unless you include the cost of the iPhone!) and a few minutes to make. The ‘disaster’ of not having the required art supply was not only diverted, but the solution became the envy of her peers.

Whenever you don’t have exactly what you need, take a look at your available equipment and tools. Sometimes you will find that you have more than you need already.

Photos taken with an iPhone 4 by Jason Theodor 2012, all rights reserved.