Last year, while I was on a business trip, my wife surprised me during a phone call by telling me that she was going to purchase a Motorola DROID and finally enter the smart phone age. This was surprising on a number of levels. She’s notoriously tight-fisted with money, for starters–is there a nice way to say that?–and isn’t the type of person to jump at the chance to toss $80 a month into the wind. She’s notably ambivalent about technology, too, which may be a shocker to some given to whom she’s married; to her, computers are a tool, and years of Mac usage did nothing to indoctrinate her into the Apple cult. (In fact, she uses–chose–a Windows 7-based Dell laptop last year.) And then there’s the DROID itself. This is a decidedly masculine smart phone, the antidote to Apple’s namby-pamby iPhone, and it was marketed then (as now) in a very aggressive fashion.

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“You’re getting … a DROID?” I could hardly believe it.

But she did it. And for the past year (almost), she’s been quite happy with her choice. She’s a Gmail and Google Calendar user, so the Android OS makes sense for her. And watching her latch onto things like Facebook has been both fascinating and disturbing.

But I’m not here to write about that. No, this is about something even more disturbing than my wife posting to Facebook. Last week, after a flurry of sudden work-related activity, I found myself the somewhat bewildered recipient of my own Android-based smart phone, in this case a DROID X. The reasons for this are complex, but basically I’m now an employee of Penton, the owners of this site, and I’m expected to meet certain corporate expectations. I’ve resisted, tried to, held out as long as I could. But now I have this phone.