Do You Poken?

This is my Poken.

It arrived in the mail the other day.

Coffeesister got one too. Her Poken is fancier, because she’s all artsy-schmartsy. My Poken is rather plain but at the same time, dignified. It’s kind of like Michael Caine in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” but not as smarmy.

I can see that expression on your face. The wrinkled nose, the furrowed brow.. you’re wondering what in the heck a “Poken” is.

Allow me..

It’s a little electronic gizmo that you plug into a USB slot on your computer. You put information on it by creating a card at the Poken website, which can contain as much or as little information as you want. Mine gives my name, what city I live in, my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and Skype profiles, plus my email address and a link to The RhodesTer Chronicles.

The point is, you can have the card say everything about you, or almost nothing. You can also have multiple cards that do both.

Then, if you’re out and about and you have your Poken on you and you meet someone who has a Poken of their own, you can whip them out and swap information by touching them together.

That’s it, and it’s perfectly legal.

See that three-fingered “hand” symbol on the Poken in the picture above? Technically it’s three fingers and a thumb. The thumb is necessary for the Poken to “grasp” the information being given it and then it “clutches” it with the fingers until you get home, whereupon it “releases” the information to your Poken account at the website when you plug it in to your computer.

Okay, I just made all of that up. It’s just a little hand symbol. But it’s not a human hand, unless they had an accident with a bandsaw, so it must be an alien hand, or a Four-Toed Hedgehog. But it’s really cool because it lights up when you swap information with somebody. It also flashes angrily at you if the information didn’t get swapped correctly, so you have a chance to try again. When it’s successful, it flashes all happy-like and you go home and download that hot chick or hunky guy’s social-networking profiles.

We recently moved out of Palm Springs to embark on new adventures. When saying goodbye to people I’d gotten to know while living there, I’d hunt around for a piece of scrap paper and a pen, then sloppily jot-down my email address, my blog url and maybe my Facebook address if there was room on the paper. So far none of them have gotten in touch, having certainly lost the paper in a terrible windstorm.

While doing all this I thought, “Dang, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a little gizmo that we all carried around and all we had to do was touch the Hedgehog hands together so that all of our information would be exchanged? They wouldn’t lose my social-networking profiles in windstorms!”

Seriously, I thought that. But alas, I didn’t know about Pokens then and neither did the people I was saying goodbye to, so we just stood there waving as the wind battered us and whipped our hats off our heads.

NOW I have a Poken, but nobody to exchange information with. I exchanged social-networking profiles with coffeesister by touching our Poken Hedgehog hands together after we’d activated them, but that’s it so far. It was kind of useless because we’ve been living together for almost 20 years so I had all of her information already. I’m thinking of obtaining Pokens for our cats just so I can add a few more users to my contacts in the Poken website.

This is because we’re stuck in a small town without a car for a while, and even if we did go out, which we don’t, I doubt there would be much opportunity to go around poken people. They just got the Internet here about a year ago, right after Edna retired from working the town’s telephone switchboard.

I know this is all very pathetic but I hope to be in San Francisco soon and actually be getting out more, where I can go around the big city and commence poken lots of people.

I hope I don’t get arrested.

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that my Poken also doubles as a flash-storage device. Over two gigabytes worth! So even though I have nobody to Poken with right now, I can store over two gigs of files on a little stick so that I can transfer it to the laptop that I don’t have.

Okay, so that explains what Poken is and now you have no excuse not to get one.. the wind is kicking up, so hang on to your hats and grab that little Hedgehog by his thumb.

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