Nailed Down

I have pretty big thumbs. 

Big enough in fact for a mate of mine to have graced me with the imaginative moniker of 'fingers'. That's what he calls me. Fingers. Surely he should call me thumbs. My fingers aren't that big. It's more my thumbs that are the issue. Then again if you knew how often the term retard is uttered in the same breath as this person's name, you'd forgive the oversight. Plus thumbs doesn't really have the same ring to it. 

Anyway this morning, nursing an expertly steamed cappuccino from one of London's superior coffee outlets, i absent-mindedly bit into the nail on my right thumb, removing a sizeable chunk. One of those ones where you lock-on, achieve pretty good purchase, get a third of the way along, assess, then close your eyes and drag on through. I didn't reach the quick, it wasn't painful. But it was pretty schoolboy.

Cutting your thumbnail a little shorter than normal shouldn't normally warrant a whole blogpost, one might think. But where things get interesting is when i throw in the curveball of owning the world's most monumentally shit mobile phone.

Not something the tap-screen mandem have to take into account anymore, but for complete manoeuvrability a phone of this size is one hundred percent reliant on the maintenance of average-to-full length nails at all times. When you fuck with this paradigm, the phone's user experience jumps straight off the 58th floor. The buttons are just too fucking small. Having long nails should be the focus of the first chapter in this phone's fucking phone manual.

 I've basically screwed myself. 

This is how i'd usually use the phone, sending a text to a chick or some shit.

This is me this morning trying to press the exact same button. 

On a particularly memorable raid during the Blitz, the Luftwaffe succeeded in bombing a key munitions factory by the docks, whilst absent-mindedly taking out the whole of Lewisham and Deptford. 

It's a situation i'm newly familiar with. Using my phone this morning is a total shot in the dark. With thumbs my size and no nail to focalise my aim, i have to press five buttons blindly in the hope one of them will be right. That's a 80% probability i'll fuck it up. I have no choice but to blanket-bomb my keypad with the surface area of a bratwurst. Imagine how long a text message is going to take. It's no wonder Nokia went under.

So yeah if today's text repertoire isn't up to scratch, hold your fire and feel my pain. It's a freak predicament. I mean, imagine someone with fingers as fat as this deciding to take up one of world's smallest and most fiddly musical instruments, like a ukelele or something. Just ridiculous.