Cellphone Dangers

Back in 2007 and 2008, screenwriters in America went on strike.  It seems as though they needed more money in order to write better scripts for television shows.

A few of the shows affected were Moonlighting, Scrubs, and Breaking Bad.  While I enjoyed two out of three of those programs, I’m not going to tell you I didn’t care for Scrubs, whose writers were clearly overpaid.

Obviously television didn’t disappear from existence because no one was writing for its shows.  Rather, TV producers turned to creating so-called “reality” programs that supposedly required little or no writing to create more new programming without unionized workers.  That’s too bad.

Suddenly those all-too-important niche scribes found themselves unemployed, not a fate unknown to everyday factory workers and others who get their hands dirty to eke out a living.

Eventually, most of those idle writers found employment.  And I often think about them whenever I locate new shows that are more inane than those in 2007 and 2008.

I’m not sure if those former writers found gainful employment in fields other than TV, though.  But I believe I stumbled across one writer when I read this newspaper article which I’d now like to share, and let you be the judge.

According to the Associated Press, there is a spike in cellphone-linked face injuries.  I know this because the article was titled, “Spike seen in cellphone-linked face injuries.”

It seems that “facial cuts, bruises and fractures” can be added to the risks of injuries from cellphones and carelessly using them.  Who knew?

This writer discovered (much like Christopher Columbus discovered America,) a study published December 5^th.  Some plastic surgeon thought a bit of research was deserved to be led by him because he realized more and more of his patients were visiting him for physical problems attributed to cellphone mishaps.  (I’ll bet there was a grant involved somewhere in there, too.  But I digress.)

Dr. Boris Paskhover of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, and others, analyzed 20-years of emergency room data.  They “found an increase in cellphone injuries starting after 2006, around the time when the first smartphones were introduced.”

People being people have long-proved their ability to wreak havoc where none is expected.  And this article shows there are few, if any, exceptions to this.

The more creative among us were injured by a myriad of causes, to include phone throwing, texting while walking, tripping, and landing facedown in the sidewalk.

According to this article, most of the cellphone patients were not hospitalized.  It should be noted that “the problem should be taken seriously.”  Uh huh.

This dark-humored article concluded by saying “nationwide, they estimated there were about 76,000 people injured during” the years 1998 through 2017.

As is evident, this AP scribe could very easily been a previously employed comedy writer, pre-strike, based on this very funny stuff.  Perhaps they gravitated to the written word over the more visual medium of television.

In any case, we appear to have a pilot for a new sitcom series here.  Good job!