“Hey kids, stop looking at your dumb phones and watch me finish off this handle!” said Tomblin.
Photo by: Jessica Ma

Local retired businessman and baby boomer Jerry Tomblin declared cellphones to be “the scourge of youth” while finishing his second bottle of Belvedere Vodka early this week. This announcement came from Tomblin during a family reunion in Des Moines, where he was seen noticeably intoxicated, partially conscious, and berating his young relatives for owning smartphones.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the self-centered youth of today are ruining my good ol’ fashioned America with their cancer-ridden, spying-for-the-government phones!” shouted Tomblin, “And no, I won’t stop yelling about this Margaret, even if it does wake up the baby. My family deserves to know that their children are destroying the country.”

Tomblin began his first day of the family reunion with a bowl of oatmeal, a shot of whiskey, and a line of cocaine. He later ignored his family’s request to join them on a morning hike, stating that they’d “probably just be on their phones the whole time,” and “who needs nature or exercise when you’ve got Jameson?” He then spent the next hour explaining how it was the rise of smartphone usage that perpetuated current world issues.

“You know, if these goddamn millennials could just get off their goddamn phones for one minute, we probably could have solved world hunger by now. But nowadays, kids are just running wild, using their phones and letting the world burn. Back in my day, no one had cell phones, and we respected our elders. I sure as hell wasn’t raised like that, and I didn’t raise my children to be this way, either,” said Tomblin. Meanwhile, every member of his family, including his wife, siblings, and children, pulled out their smartphones to record his rant.

After a three hour nap, Tomblin drank his first bottle of black label vodka and proceeded to criticize his nephew Samuel for both owning an iPhone and accruing student debt while at university.

“When I was growing up, all we had to do was go to high school, and boom, we had a financially stable job until retirement. Then all of a sudden, fancy modern phones come out and kids are saying they need at least a college degree to be successful? It looks to me like there’s a pretty obvious cause there. I mean, no one else besides these dumb kids are using those things.”

Tomblin’s daughter Carol later tried to explain that research has found that over 77 percent of Americans are smartphone users, with a high percentage of users over the age of 50. She continued to argue that there is no significant evidence linking the increased use of cellphones to a decline in the job market. Tomblin’s only response was to accuse “all of those illegitimate MSNBC news anchors” of tainting Carol’s information, arguing that “no one who dresses that bad could be reporting real news.”

“When you get right down to it, it’s those liberals who really caused this. Putting out sensationalized media, ruining the economy, and trusting a man in a turtleneck to run a business. Back in my day we just let those smart men in suits run everything; in 2016, we almost let a woman run the country. And I’d bet a million bucks that every person who voted for Hillary was just too distracted by their smartphone games to notice they were voting for the devil.”

Tomblin was later seen at the dinner table, struggling to stand and shouting obscenities at his grandchildren about the death of family values. After drinking his fifth shot of whiskey, he finished his night by watching re-runs of MAS*H on his iPad and ignoring his relatives, who were having game night in the living room.