I’ve seen the future. In it, my kind are outcasts. We’re a dying breed that the rest of society spits on. Worst of all, we’re undesirable mates for the opposite sex, who understand that our particular defining trait isn’t worth preserving in the human gene pool. When you’re talking about evolution, that’s what it’s all about, meaning my kind is doomed. If you’ve tried to guess, the “kind” I’m referring to isn’t Italian-Americans, white people, or attractive, funny, smart young men. No, the kind to which I’m referring is people with fat fingers.

Vegas doesn’t have odds on what human trait will be the next to be weeded out by evolution, but if they did, I know that I would put all of my money on an affliction commonly referred to as sausage fingers. After all, with newer generations of cell phones featuring touch screens and miniature keyboards, fat-fingered men and women are at a serious disadvantage. Personally, I haven’t graduated to one of these phones yet, but when I’ve had the chance to play around with a friend or family member’s, I’ve found them impossible to navigate. I try to push one icon on a touch screen, but my pudgy metacarpal hits one of the other three around it. I try to type out a simple message on the flee-sized buttons of a slide-out keyboard, and “Hey what’s up?” turns into “Jrt wqhst’d pou?”

This is Bad News Bears in a world where text messaging is becoming a more and more necessary communication method everyday. A couple weeks ago I was playing Risk (the game of global domination) with five friends. The text messaging was rampant as people tried to strategize and align with the other players. From this small sample group in Risk (the game of global domination), I can only assume that world diplomacy works the same way. Kim Jong-Il and Ahmadinejad text back and forth about their plans of nuclear attack on the Western world. While Hugo Chavez rails on the United States at the UN lectern, Gordon Brown texts Barack Obama, “:-( sorry buddy.” The business world is using it too. Bosses are calling employees into conference rooms and conducting meetings strictly through text messaging.

Religion is taking it a step farther. The Catholic Church is considering incorporating the technology into various sacraments, namely marriage and confession. The latter makes sense considering you don’t need the face-to-face interaction to be absolved by a priest. With marriage, exchanging wedding vows through texts seems logical considering the couple more likely than not fell in love through textual communication. None of these changes are surprising since the Church always has been one to embrace technology and change.

When I imagine the next evolutionary step for homo sapiens, I picture people with long, pointy fingers engineered by Nature to manipulate touch screens and wee little keypads. Considering how fast the technology is evolving, and there’s a good chance that phones and their buttons will only continue to diminish in size, I think this great leap in human change is less than 100 years off. Before I die, I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw little pointy-fingered children zooming around on their hover bikes texting away with phones that can disappear in their fists.

We’ve all seen how dependent people of all ages have become on texting. Sometimes we choose to have a 5 minute text exchange instead of a 30 second phone conversation. When I was in the grocery store last night, carriages were crashing into each other left and right because the text-crazed people (myself included) were simultaneously pushing their carts and sending messages. With all this evidence staring us in the face, we have to see the inevitability that our bodies will respond to the need for smaller fingers over time.

The phones certainly won’t change. Eventually, my old school, run-of-the-mill touchtone phones will be a thing of the past. To adapt, I’ll have to buy a smart phone with a touch screen or a Blackberry with the keypad where one of my fingertips covers the surface area of nine keys. Unless these touch screens become more fat finger-friendly, my means cellular of communication will diminish. I won’t be able to keep up with the rest of the world, and the rest of the world will have no problem leaving me in the dust.

And I won’t even be able to text people to come back and get me.