An ashamed electron

"There I was...many decades ago, undiscovered and revolving in my own little world. Completely satisfied in fulfilling my worldly duties while hidden from the world. Until humans finally discovered me. I changed the world, one circuit at a time. And how proud I was! Hi--I'm an electron, and I'm currently being enslaved and made to do embarrassing things, like relaying messages like these:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/11/twitter.childbirth.sara/index.html "

I guess I'm simply missing the "curiosity" gene. Why, oh why, would I want to receive any form of instant message that gives me these details? And worse yet if I did, why oh why do I know people like them? Twittering and texting while in labour! I knew childbirth was extremely stressful, but I didn't know going crazy was a likely symptom! I can just imagine people choosing hospitals by signal strength!

Silly phenomena give rise to sillier explanations. "Sharing the pain so that I don't feel it as much, others feel it with me too"?? I can imagine the pain all right.

Kinda puts more pressure on us engineeers though, doesn't it? Imagine the lawsuit on RIM if their blackberry stopped working at that point (a critical, possibly once-in-a-lifetime event), leading to emotional stress and trauma! Or there is a ...ahem... software bug in the time-measuring iPhone app that is being used to measure contractions?

The most hilarious part of the above article is Kickbee: a product that supposedly wraps around a pregnant belly with a belt, and sends a tweet (like a small text message for the uninitiated) every time the baby kicks. That would be one embarrassing childhood story--my kicks caused tweets! Maybe one day technology would advance so that the baby could tweet the due date!